


Covet

by Anonymous



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Age Difference, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Explicit Sexual Content, Jealousy, M/M, Peter is 18, Pining, Power Imbalance, author has already arranged a ride to church trust me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-02 21:41:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 33,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15805125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Peter has a new boyfriend. Tony starts drinking again, for unrelated reasons.





	1. Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Once more with feeling: I would NEVER wish for such feelings or dynamics to develop in real life, but this is fiction land, where no one real gets hurt. Please don't read this work if you don't want to, but if you do want to: I hope you enjoy! :)
> 
> The canon diverges before Infinity War. Thanos waits a little longer to collect the stones, and it gives them time to heal, get the band back together. Like the Beatles.
> 
> For those who have asked, the tag for my anon starker fic is ['author has already arranged a ride to church trust me'](https://archiveofourown.org/tags/author%20has%20already%20arranged%20a%20ride%20to%20church%20trust%20me)

“Mr Stark, that’s awesome. Thank you, I—thank you.”

Tony watches Peter walk away—practically skip away with triumph. His thick brown hair is matted with sweat that trails down the nape of his neck, and his pants flap about his knees because he keeps wearing clothes that are too large on him. Eventually he disappears around the corner towards the gym showers, and Tony reluctantly feels a fond smile tug at his mouth.

He keeps rejecting Peter’s gratitude, but the kid keeps stubbornly flinging it at him regardless; as if Tony _invented_  the moon before single-handedly hanging it up in the sky.

“Tony.”

A familiar voice makes him turn to look over his shoulder at Steve. It seems as though they are the last two trainees left in this corner of the enclosure; Happy is clearing up the rink out of earshot on the other side of the room, and everyone else is gone.

“What’s up, Rogers?”

Steve’s blue eyes flicker meaningfully to the door Peter just walked out of. His expression is amused, and just a touch pitying.  “Be nice.”

Tony frowns in confusion. 

“I’m sorry, what just happened? Wasn’t that me, being nice?” He scratches at the sweat building up around the insertion points of the arc reactor. Something like unease stirs in his gut. “I’m confused.”

Steve lifts an eyebrow, with a look that implies they are both in on it and he doesn’t believe Tony is confused about anything. “You’re not helping him.”

“Not…?” The unease crystallizes into a shard of real hurt at that choice of words. Tony tries to sound unaffected: “I thought I’d been helping him for the past three years. I thought the conversation we just had was all about me helping him. Helping him move his stuff, specifically.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t, actually.” Okay, this is getting annoying. “So why don’t you go ahead and tell me.”

Steve tilts his head at a patient angle. He’s still smiling faintly, like this is funny.

“Well… I think you’re killing him with all that kindness. And I think it’s only going to get worse now that he’s moving into the compound. Hence; be nice to the kid. Tone it down a little.”

He shrugs and starts to walk away, as though that wasn’t a really fucked up thing to say. Tony just finished getting punched by one of his friends, but he was wearing padding for the first round.

“You’re laying this on _me_?” he calls to Steve’s back. “Seriously?”

“Of course not. And I’m not saying it’s fair, either, but…” Steve bends down to pick up two of his boxing bags in a single sweeping move. Super-strong bastard. “He’s never going to get over it otherwise.” He keeps walking.

Happy looks up from the distant rink, frowning in confusion at the phrase without context.

An unwelcome churn of tar-like guilt is rising in the pit of Tony’s stomach, souring everything he just said to Peter, blackening the memory of Peter’s grateful smile until all Tony sees is teeth. _You’re killing him with all that kindness_. What is he supposed to do, exactly? Start being rude to the kid? Push him away?

A knee-jerk ‘no’ stops the panic attack before it can start. The black recedes from his mind. No; Peter relies on him for mentorship, for advice, even for friendship—it would be cruel to suddenly give him a cold shoulder for no apparent reason.

Steve is well-intentioned, but wrong. ~~~~

“Tony? You guys done here?” Happy calls, on his way out.

“Yeah. Yeah, we’re done.”

And anyway it is _not_ his fault that the kid is in love with him.

*

Tony tries not to think about it too much.

He noticed the burgeoning crush right away during their first meeting, and couldn’t help taking stock of Peter’s reactions to his presence in subsequent encounters. It made him uncomfortable, obviously, because Peter was (and still is) a teenager—but it was also less than a huge surprise. A lot of pretty young things develop a brief starry-eyed crush on Tony Stark after meeting him in person; that’s just how life has been for him for decades. It usually lasts a few weeks until the full spectrum of Tony’s fucked up and unhealthy life choices hits, and then it fades into admiration of the more distant, platonic kind.

Given that precedent, Tony had figured that Peter having a crush on him was a little bit wrong, and a little bit cringe-inducing, but hardly a matter to bring to the courts. Tony had expected it to pass, so he hadn’t actively done anything about it back when Peter was fifteen.

It... didn’t pass.

Months went by and became years and, well—Tony couldn’t help the occasional notice of Peter’s continued devotion. Peter turned sixteen, and blushed harder than ever at Tony’s accidental double-entendres, or if he watched him put on the Iron Man suit (Peter really likes the suit). Peter turned seventeen, and stuttered his way through asking Tony how his date went, and whether Tony had always liked men or it was a n-new d-development.

Peter recently turned eighteen, and he’s gotten better at hiding the more obvious signs but still shuffles uncomfortably if Tony brushes up against him, or works out across from him at the gym, or puts on the suit (that’s still a thing, apparently). It’s almost flattering, in a sickly kind of way. Peter doesn’t date, doesn’t mention girls or boys his age… Tony feels a little bad about it. He feels sorry for the poor kid, if he’s being honest.

But it’s not like there’s anything he can do about it.

*

Peter definitively moves into the Avengers compound a couple of weeks after Tony receives Steve’s unwanted advice. The world doesn't know it yet because they've kept his identity from the press to this day, but that reveal will probably happen soon. For now, everyone is still celebrating the one-year anniversary of the reunion of the Avengers, and Bruce Banner's rainbow-powered crash-land on earth along with the mighty Thor's return.

The room Peter wisely rejected all those years ago is the one he ends up occupying, in what Tony thinks is a nice little circular homecoming moment for them. Tony crams in as much cutting edge tech as he can get away with, as well as two new programmable Spider-gadgets for Peter to try out and a couple of suits for when Peter has to join in on Avengers business at the UN.

To say Tony's gestures are appreciated would be something of an understatement.

Peter does a double-backflip somersault onto the king-size bed and immediately asks permission to livestream the quarters ("Just to Ned and MJ! I promise! A private feed!"), making Tony duck a little to say hello to the camera, then yelping when Vision glides through a wall and bursting into laughter. Tony watches him enjoy it all with warm pride, and just a bit of relief. It helps that Peter keeps looking at him like Tony came up with the concept of mattresses and is personally responsible for Peter being allowed to sleep on one; a look that persists during the welcome dinner Tony arranged for him that night.

Unfortunately there are a couple of moments during the dinner where Tony catches a variation of the look that probably still includes mattresses, but definitely doesn't include sleep.

*

Half the team gets called in for a mission in Cairo the very next day after Peter’s arrival, leaving Bruce, Tony and Peter behind with Happy and the ancillary house staff. One thing the UN mandated was that, unless proven to be a Category VI threat, the whole team wouldn’t engage an enemy at once and leave the rest of the world without an Avenger standing guard.

If the close contact of their new living situation is making Peter’s little infatuation situation worse, the kid does a decent job of acting like his usual self—there's an underlying current of admiration that was already there, but nothing dramatic changes. If Tony's honest with himself, it’s actually kind of wonderful to have Peter around all the time; he’s a real breath of fresh air in the compound, and easily one of Tony’s favorite people—not that he’d admit this to him, or anyone else. Someone who doesn't appreciate how amazingly smart and engaging Tony's little prodigy is might accuse Tony of liking Peter nearby just because Peter's attention is kind to his ego, but they would be wrong (and they would still be wrong if they rebranded Tony's ego as the fragile construct that is Tony's nonexistent but well-projected self-confidence).

“M-Mr Stark. Hey, Stark, wait!”

Think of the devil; Peter is striding towards him from across the hall. Tony holds the elevator door open for him, smiling faintly when Peter gets close enough that he can read his shirt--it says ‘ _Binary, it’s as easy as 01, 10, 11_ ’.

“How’s it going, kid?”

Peter settles next to him, nodding at Tony’s wordless press of the button for the lobby. He’s wearing jeans that weren’t meant to sit so low-slung, but once again they are sized for someone twice Peter’s width.

“Good. It’s good. I’m… really glad high school is over.” He grins. “Finally.”

Tony believes him, but there’s a little twinkle of distress in Peter’s eye that the grin doesn’t quite hide.

He takes a guess: “But that means your friends are moving away for college, right?”

Bingo. The twinkle blooms into a starburst of hurt, and Peter looks up at him, caught. “Y-yeah, but that’s. We knew that was gonna happen.”

“Must still suck, to know you’re going to miss them.”

Peter hesitates for a moment, but then he drops the grin and nods, mouth pinched in a small pout. His shoulders hunch a little, and his gaze falls to the floor in a pained flutter of lashes—he looks like he needs a hug. Tony can’t be the one to provide it, but he feels a protective surge at the thought regardless. Peter was the one who stubbornly chose to join the Avengers straight out of high school, but Tony was the one who caved and let him.

He puts a hand on Peter’s upper arm and squeezes. “Hey. I’m not saying we’re a substitute, but your new teammates will look out for you, okay? And I have a jet that will take you wherever you want to go, anytime.” Before he can stutter out a grateful protest at the offer, Tony continues: “And Shuri is going to visit the compound, too, so it won’t be just us old guys.”

The doors slide open and Tony drops his hand; they’ve made it to the ground floor. No one’s around, of course. Tony doesn’t exit after Peter because he has to go back up to the helipad to fly into the city for meetings.

“Where are you off to in the middle of the day, anyway?” he asks, holding the doors open again with a hand.

“Oh, just the lab building. Bruce said he needs me to test out some new type of restraints for the Hulk?”

“Interesting.” Peter’s web fluid as restraints. Hm. “I was going to offer you a ride into New York but I guess you’re busy.”

“Aw, thanks! Maybe I’ll ride you another time— _with_ you. Ride with you another time.” Peter coughs, or pretends to. It’s not dramatic enough that Tony can’t act like the slip went unnoticed. “I appreciate the offer, though.”

“Okay, then.” Tony nods. “Well, I’ll probably see you back here tonight.”

Peter nods back. His cheeks are splotchy pink. “Sounds good. Thanks again, for offering—“

“You can ride with me whenever you want, Parker.” He winks at him briskly and the doors swoosh shut between them.

Alone, Tony deliberately doesn’t think about anything for a few moments.

Then the elevator deposits him on the roof, and he finally lets himself acknowledge that the little Freudian slip was proof, if Tony needed it, that Peter’s little situation is still going strong. Well. It’s nothing he didn’t already suspect, and that was a pretty harmless interaction overall, so he can just file it away and not dwell on it too much, for his own peace of mind.

He climbs into the cockpit with a vague sense of elation he can’t quite place. Or maybe he can—things are actually going well for the team for once, and no one’s actively trying to end the world. The Avengers finally have time to train, hone their skills and improve their interpersonal relationships. The compound’s young new tenant is someone Tony not only genuinely enjoys spending time with, but who constantly manages to surprise him. He feels like he’s finally ready to say he’s over Pepper, much as part of him will continue to deeply care for her for the rest of his life.

Things are good. Really good.

*

It lasts five more days.

*

He flies Bruce and Peter to New York for dinner a couple of times, and that way Peter can stay over at his Aunt's place and Tony can quietly keep buying himself points back in May Parker's favor. She doesn't blame him for Peter's choices, exactly, but she knows he ended up enabling them, and is not his biggest fan at the moment. Tony certainly doesn't blame her for those feelings. Another reason to take Peter to Queens these last few days is so he can spend time with his friends, which Peter would never ask for but desperately needs. The way his eyes shine when Tony reveals that he arranged for Ned Leeds and Michelle Jones to pick him up at the restaurant is enough to give a man some sort of superhero complex.

The Cairo contingent comes back on day four of Tony’s good streak.

The debrief involves a discussion with the whole team, and even though their usual team meetings happen in informal scatters along the couches and armchairs of the living room area, debriefs are considered official by the UN, and thus conducted in the conference room. Tony likes to joke that if he’d known he wouldn’t have signed so quickly. Steve says that’s not as funny as Tony thinks.

“...which was why Nat had to kiss Sam as a distraction.”

“I want it on the record that she slipped me some tongue,” Sam says.

Natasha snorts. The holographic projection of Ross is less amused. “And the car crash?” he says curtly, not acknowledging Sam’s remark at all.

“We lost our brakes.” Steve shrugs. “It was either that or driving into the market.”

“Hm.” Ross makes a note and Steve’s jaw ticks with tension despite his deceptively relaxed shoulders. He’s never truly relaxed during these things—the Accords may have significantly expanded their definition of ‘oversight’ to accommodate Steve’s team’s conditions for return, but that distrust remains. And of course, there’s always Bucky.

“Well, I suppose that will have to be enough for now. We will get back to you with our recommendations on how to proceed going forward.”

Tony leans forward to disconnect the call. “And we’ll let you know if we intend to follow them.” And hangs up before Ross’ holo can protest.

He gets a look of approval from Steve for it, which makes it completely worth it.

“So.” Tony glances around the room. “Anyone have anything to add? Anything you just realized slipped your mind while we were talking to Mr Ross, by any chance? Fury's going to expect mine and Steve's report by tonight.”

Peter, who is sitting next to Bucky, raises his hand.

“...Peter?”

“Okay, so I wasn’t there or anything, but I was wondering how, um, weapons disabling works and whether those of us who are newer to the team will get a chance to learn?”

“Good question, Peter,” says Steve. “I know we all think about combat a lot but on this mission disabling the bomb was half the fight, and it took us much longer than it should have because we had to remote call Dr Banner for help. I’ll be the first to admit I found my knowledge of digitally programmed explosives lacking.” He swivels his chair in Tony’s direction. “Any insights, Tony?”

“Plenty.” Tony smiles tightly. “Let’s meet up this afternoon for a chat, shall we?”

“I want in, I could use a refresher course,” Sam says.

“Me too,” adds Wanda bitterly. “I would rather not have to contain the explosion after it happens.”

A few others ask to participate as well, and Tony mentally starts lesson planning to adjust for everyone’s different backgrounds and knowledge bases—ironically Peter is probably the most advanced among the group, given his understanding of engineering as well as programming far surpasses Steve or Wanda’s.

The meeting dissolves after that, with people beginning to exit the room in groups of twos and threes.

Peter walks up to Tony before he can make for the door.

“Mr Stark?”

“What’s up, Parker?”

At the other end of the room, Steve hooks an arm around Bucky’s neck and walks out, chuckling about something Sam said.

“I didn’t…” Peter licks his lips. “I didn’t want to ask in front of the others, but.” He takes a step closer to Tony and they are suddenly alone, even though the effect is mitigated by the fact that this room has glass walls. Nat was the last one out.

“Mr Stark, I was wondering…”

Tony stays very still where he is, mind carefully blank, waiting.

“I…”

“What is it?”

Peter lets out a slow breath. “When am I going to be called in for a mission?”

Tony coughs unexpectedly, startling himself and Peter. “Oh, I—Peter, you’ve been at the compound for less than a week. Give it a little time.”

Peter frowns. “How much time? Do they not—don’t they trust me?”

“Of course we trust you.” Tony sighs, and puts a hand on Peter’s shoulder. Peter’s breath stutters, but Tony ignores this. “Assignments are mostly random. It depends on flight capability, and mission parameters, and availability, and location. Cairo was a shit-show that required our espionage and military-trained guys, and prep time was nonexistent. We wanna get you trained up a little bit first on team dynamics before throwing you in there unprepared.”

Peter cuts him a look from under his wavy fringe. “Right. ‘Cause picking me up and dropping me into a superhero battle without context is something you’d never do.”

“...All right, I walked right into that one.”

Peter smirks, but it soon softens as he keeps looking up at Tony. He blinks slowly, blush creeping up his neck to his face and ears. His breath hasn’t evened out yet—and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to anytime soon. He looks like he'd let Tony pick him up and drop him wherever Tony wanted a million times over.

_You’re killing him with all that—_

Tony drops his hand from its perch.

“Well, I can promise you that soon enough you’ll be looking back at these days of leisure and wishing we had less missions to go on.” He claps Peter on the back. “Come on, let’s go eat.”

*

"Well, I spoke to Maria three days ago and the individual field reports are still a thing," Nat is saying.

"I'm just saying I didn't get into this business for the paperwork. We have lives to save."

"Respectfully Rogers, none of us chose this, and it is not a business." Thor sighs. "Accountability in written form seems reasonable in my view. When one is as powerful as I am--"

Bruce chuckles and interrupts him, making Tony wonder if that was some sort of reference to their time together on those other planets. The team has splintered into individual conversations after officially finishing their bomb-disabling lesson; the last of Rhodey's military friends who Tony invited to help out took off a half hour ago. Because Rhodey likes helping the cooking robots in the kitchen, Tony is somewhat siloed and forced to note the ways in which the group divides up nowadays; pairs and trios forged by their own little side quests that bonded them closer together. Nat, Steve and Sam are inseparable with Bucky. Bruce and Thor. Wanda and Vision.

"Mr Stark?"

Peter perches himself on the back of the sofa above Tony's shoulder. How he stays balanced with his legs crossed, Tony has no idea.

He leans back against the cushions and tips his face up to look at him. "What's up, Monkey-Man?"

"It's Spider--"

"No, I'm with Tony on this one," Sam offers from an armchair, raising his hand like they are in class. "You're freakishly flexible and it's disturbing."

Peter rolls his eyes. It's only then that Tony notices that what he initially thought was Peter's generic-looking sports shirt is, in fact, about a very specific triathlon. A small subtitle in the design proclaims the Ironman the _Global Race of Champions_.

Tony smiles down at his own lap. Man, talk about disarming--

"You're a danger to yourself and others," he tells Peter curtly, not looking up this time.

"I'm scrappy."

"You're a little menace, is what you are, and a drag on my conscience."

Peter snorts and somehow nudges the back of Tony's head with his shoe. It all goes downhill from there because Sam catches him at it, and Wanda suspends Peter in mid-air with her powers so that Natasha can take his web shooters from his wrists, and then she puts them on to test their tensile strength against Thor and they break a table and two of Tony's imported Japanese vases, causing damages in the tens of thousands of dollars. Bruce laughs through his dismay and Tony just laughs, watching Peter break free of Wanda's hold and jump to ride piggyback on Steve and direct him to retrieve his web shooters with Sam's help.

Throughout this chaos Bucky stays seated, but he smiles fondly at them and, at one point, meets Tony's gaze and gives him a small nod. It doesn't matter that they are playing up the lightheartedness for Peter's sake; it does them all a world of good.

*

On the day when Tony’s streak ends, things start out ordinary.

“Morning, Peter,” Rhodey says from the kitchen table.

“Good morning, Rhodey. Mr Stark.”

Tony finishes setting up his coffee maker the way he likes it and flicks the switch on ‘brew’ before turning around. He tilts his head at Peter. “Parker.”

Peter is wearing an overlarge shirt and shorts that slide even further up his thighs when he sits down. It seems to be his sleep uniform, since this isn’t the first time he’s worn the outfit around the compound.

Tony distractedly makes a mental note to replace their glass table with some solid oak, or mahogany.

“So…” Peter grabs an unused spoon from the table and starts fiddling with it. He’s inordinately energized (or perhaps the word is ‘restless’) for the early hour. “Any updates on our next mission? Did Cap say anything?”

“Here’s an important life lesson, kid,” Rhodey says, putting down his cup and leaning towards Peter with all the airs of a wise old savant. “A big part of the job? Is the waiting for shit to hit the fan.”

Tony, who can’t resist recycling this joke to this day, turns to face him. “ _Language_ ,” he says. “There are children here, Rhodey. I’m gonna tell Steve.”

“I’m _eighteen_ ,” Peter mumbles, not for the first time since he legally became an adult.

“He meant himself,” Rhodey says flatly. “I think it’s safe to say you’re the least mature person in this room, Tony.”

“Arguable, since I am only five years old,” comes a voice from behind Tony.

Tony jumps, whirling around to glare at Vision. “Dude,” he snaps. “Warn a guy. And you’d better not pull that trick around young Parker; he is impressionable and innocent, and we just got done establishing that he’s basically a toddler—“

“Oh come on—“

“So I’m gonna need you to start acting like walls are non-optional.”

“I never bother Peter in his bedroom,” Vision says. “Particularly if he has company.”

The banter of the morning grinds to a halt as Vision’s words are followed by a long, stunned silence. Then Tony’s coffee starts gurgling.

The spoon Peter was fiddling with clangs onto the glass tabletop.

“I’m sorry,” Tony says, in a controlled voice. “…Say again?”

Vision looks at Peter, then back to Tony, his expression betraying nothing, though his delay in providing a response certainly gives away enough to prompt speculation.

“I.”

Tony nods encouragingly, feeling on the verge of some sort of hysterical explosion—laughter, probably. This is funny, right? “Yes…?”

“I made a mistake. I see this now.” Vision starts to float backwards.

“Don’t you dare, Vis,” Tony warns.

“I’m sorry, Peter,” he says, right before fading into the counter and then the wall, disappearing from view.

Tony stares at the spot he vanished from, and his shoulders slump. “Coward.”

A thumping noise makes him turn to look behind him. Peter dropped his head on the table.

Rhodey starts laughing. “Aw, come on! You have to tell us, now. Was it Shuri? That’s the only age appropriate—“

“No,” Peter mumbles, voice dampened by the glass. “Not Shuri.”

“Then who did you sneak into your room?” Rhodey demands, but he seems delighted by this line of inquiry instead of shocked at the horrifying breach of security.

“And how did you sneak them in?” Tony adds. The impending explosion in his chest has expanded to the point where it feels like it’s pressing on his lungs, but he still can’t seem to get the laughter out. He should be laughing, like Rhodey is, he gets that. He just—he can’t get it out.

“And _why_?” says Rhodey.

Tony points a finger-gun at him. “In fact, start with the why.”

Peter groans softly, and when he resurfaces his face is closed off and beet red and he won’t look either of them in the eye. He mumbles something incomprehensible.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” Rhodey asks.

“I've only done it once. Just to hang out,” he tells the table.

“Just hang out? What, like play videogames?”

“Hang out means something different now, Rhodey,” Tony says dismissively. He can’t look away from Peter. Peter, who was supposed to be—wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that Steve was telling Tony to ‘be nice’ and how he was ‘killing him with all that kindness’ and—just days ago Peter said that thing about riding him, not to mention the _looks_ \-- “Okay, on to the how. As in; how the fuck did you bypass my security protocols, Parker?”

He feels Rhodey whip his head around in surprise at the swear, but Peter doesn’t seem to notice.

“I asked one of my friends for help—“

“Ned Leeds again? That kid needs to come work for me.”

“—and hacked into FRIDAY’s ID software.”

Rhodey chuckles. “Impressive.”

“That depends on the ‘who’, though,” Tony says. Peter has picked up the spoon again and is rubbing it with his thumb, making it creak metallically like he’s forgotten he has the strength of ten men and can break things easy. “Peter. Who did you bring into my house?”

He doesn’t often have reason to remind them of who funds everything they do, including where they live.

“Just. Matt.”

Matt. The name rings a—

“Pepper’s assistant?”

Peter nods, chewing on the inside of his cheek.

Tony’s body is still unclear on how it wants to react to all of this information—at least part of him is having some sort of seizure about relating to every father who ever made a shotgun comment, and breathing continues to be hard—but Tony’s mind gets that he hasn’t cracked a smile this entire time, and Rhodey is starting to look at him funny. So. He makes himself smile as though he feels relieved that Peter is exhibiting interest in someone closer to his own age. Because he is. This is a good thing. A good, funny, charming thing.

“I see.” He nods. “Matt’s been here before.”

“Yes, that’s how we were able to bypass the security ID software. He’s been identified as a non-threat in the past.”

“Got it.” He nods some more. “So Matt’s a bit older than you, right? What is he—nineteen? Twenty?”

Peter says “Yes,” again, but this time with a touch less certainty.

“He’s in his early twenties, right?” Tony says. “Right, Peter?”

“Um… yeah. Early twenties.”

“How early?”

“Um.”

“I can call Pepper right now and ask her.”

“He’s twenty-six,” Peter says, jaw set defiantly. “And you and Ms Potts were more than ten years apart in age, and so are King T’Challa and Nakia, and Thor was _thousands_ of years old when he dated Jane, and Wanda and Vision—“

“Whoa, whoa, there,” Rhodey exclaims, hands raised placatingly. “We’re not accusing Matt of anything, here. I’m sure you know what you’re doing. You’re an adult and that means you’re responsible for your own choices.”

He’s right, of course. Peter is eighteen, and when Tony was eighteen the shit he got up to was exponentially, _comically_ worse.

Tony hears himself say: “We just want to know that you’re safe.”

“I got the talk from my aunt years ago, Mr Stark.”

“Ha. Funny. I don’t mean that kind of safe.” He pauses. “Actually I do, but I mostly mean the other thing.”

He walks around the counter and the table, until he’s standing next to Peter. There are still a couple of sleep-creases along Peter’s left cheek, near his ear. His hair is tousled in a purposeless but naturally charming way. He’s eighteen. He’s making slightly healthier choices in his personal life. He’s growing.

All good things.

Peter’s eyes flick up to meet his. “...What?”

“This guy good enough for you? Hm? Or do Rhodey and I need to kick his ass?”

Peter swallows, and Tony watches the nervous bob of Peter’s Adam’s apple from his high angle. He doesn’t answer.

“Listen kid, I’m going to reprogram FRIDAY tonight. Get her back to source code.” Peter nods, shoulders slumping in defeat. “But I’m also going to add Matt to the security roster so he can get the front door treatment, instead of whatever you guys were doing.”

Peter’s eyes widen in surprise, and then he snorts, and Tony gets the potential ‘back door’ joke a second later but doesn’t comment on it. Rhodey is made of better stuff that him and seems genuinely unaware of the implication.

“Thanks, Mr Stark.”

“You got it.”

He stares down at him a few seconds longer, and then he walks back to the coffee maker and pours himself enough to give himself a caffeine-induced headache.

Later, once Peter has left (fled, really) Rhodey gives Tony a big smile.

“Man, you must be over the moon.”

“Hm?”

“I thought he was never going to get over you. This must be a relief, huh?”

Tony puts his cup back down in front of him, empty. He flashes Rhodey a smile in return. “Yeah. God, yeah. Huge relief.” ~~~~

*

It begins that night.

It starts with a nightmare that’s not about war or the unbearable vastness of space or about failing to save the people he loves—it’s happy. Bad dreams feel good sometimes, right up until you wake up.

Doesn’t mean they aren’t nightmares. 


	2. Mint

Pepper asks to meet him for his weekly hour-long Stark Industries rundown the very next day, and Tony distractedly agrees in the middle of welding two parts together so he isn’t really thinking about it. He even forgets that it’s happening at all until FRIDAY reminds him ten minutes prior, and it occurs to him then: that Pepper is rarely alone in meetings these days—she’s too busy and too important.

He’s still in the lab when they arrive, but Pepper makes sure to drag him down to the living room area to chat. Matt is with her. So are two other assistants, or senior executives, or maybe one of them is the new CFO; Tony forgets.

“Pep.”

“Tony.” She smiles at him, kind as ever. The breakup set her free, and she looks looser around the shoulders—unburdened. Or Tony’s just projecting. “How is your hand feeling today? Not gonna cramp up on us and suddenly render you unable to finish signing, is it?”

From the kitchen, Wanda snorts. Natasha says something quietly to her that makes her do it again.

“All right, peanut gallery. I built entire floors for you to be elsewhere if needed.”

The two depart (but not before Nat gives him the finger) and Tony instructs FRIDAY to tell other teammates that a meeting is ongoing in the living room if they try to enter. And to give him a heads up if they decide to come in anyway.

“Sorry, Pep, you were saying.”

Pepper hands him a summary sheet. “Projections for next year. We’re trying to meet the aggressive anti-pollution standards and I think we’re doing well, but there’s room for improvement in the automotive sector, not to mention getting our subsidiaries to adopt the same levels of environmental sustainability...”

Tony’s gaze wanders over to Matt, for whom he has barely spared a thought during these things in the past. He’s taking notes for Pepper on a tablet.

“Tony?”

“Hm?”

She heaves a small sigh. “Are you listening to me?”

“Sure. I just.” He looks at Matt again. “You.”

The unsuspecting victim shoots him a surprised look. “Mr Stark?” Tony’s never addressed him directly before. Not out of rudeness or anything, he just. Never had a reason to.

Matt has a deep voice. He’s tall, in a well-cut suit. Blond, and generic-looking. Vaguely resembles Thor, or maybe it’s just that he’s blond. Tony would have thought that, if anything, Peter’s first boyfriend should resemble—but that’s neither here nor there. Nothing about Matt seems particularly special.

Tony wonders where Peter is right now—in his room, probably.

“…Sir?”

“Nothing. Sorry. Let’s just… get this over with.”

Pepper shoots him a confused look but Tony minutely shakes his head, silently asking her not to follow-up. She lets it go, and spends the next hour trying to get him up to date on the company’s next steps.

When they are done and Peter still hasn’t come out of his room, not even with an excuse to get something from the kitchen, Tony looks at Pepper as she loads up the paperwork into the case Matt is holding.

“Hey, Pep?”

“Hm?”

“I was thinking, we should do these in the city from now on.”

“Oh?” She raises her eyebrows. “You want to come to us?”

“Yes. It just makes sense, and it’s no big deal for me to suit up and—“

“Oh God, don’t you dare show up to a board meeting in the suit, Tony.” She looks distraught, like he’s already stated his desire to do so. “For the love of--I have a hard enough time getting people to separate Stark Industries and Iron Man’s brand without—“

“Not what I’m saying,” he interrupts, gesturing with his hands. “Just... some extremely classified stuff happens up here. And it’s no trouble for me to fly down and change into a work-appropriate outfit to sign a few papers once a week. That’s all I was saying.”

“...Oh.” Pepper glances at the woman who may or may not be the new CFO. The woman nods. “Well, it would make things easier.” She smiles softly at him. “You’d do that? Fly down to New York once a week, at a set time, even?”

“I make no promises if we’re mid-battle, but otherwise... sure.”

The pleasure in her expression feels unearned.

“Well... thanks. That would be really great, I would really appreciate it. It would save us a lot of time.”

“Then it’s done. We’ll meet at the Tower next week. No need for the whole team to make this trek.”

After they make their way out, Tony tells FRIDAY he doesn't need to know when someone tries to get into the living room anymore, and slowly walks over to Peter's bedroom. He's going to tell Peter to meet him in the lab tomorrow for some Spider-Man suit updates, and maybe the opportunity will come up to gently break it to him that Matt will no longer be visiting the compound on a weekly basis.

The door is ajar, and Tony doesn't even have time to formulate a hypothesis before someone opens it from within, fully, to exit the room. Someone who isn't Peter.

"--around?"

"Yeah. Of course. I still go to New York all the time, remember?"

And that's Peter's voice. Matt's back is still to the outside, but the angle doesn't let Tony see much else. He should have expected that this might happen. Matt would have been an idiot to let the opportunity to see Peter in person pass him by.

"Good. Then... go save the world, or something."

"I told you, I haven't even been on a mission since I moved into--"

"It's a figure of speech, little Parker."

"Stop calling me th--" but Matt leans forward and muffles the rest of Peter's sentence. Tony has no trouble picturing how.

He leaves, and pulls out his phone to text Happy to meet him at the gym so they can go a few rounds.

*

He drinks a finger of scotch before bed, hoping to dull his senses and avoid having dreams. Alcohol has always helped keep his mind blank; it slows down his thoughts enough that he can run away from them.

It’s not like he’d ever officially quit, or anything. He’d just—he’d gotten through several months only drinking socially, with company.

*

“Oh my god. Mr Stark this is amazing!”

Tony smiles gently, pleased with Peter’s reaction to the new design of the nanotech suit. He still wears the flexicloth for his regular patrols, but has worn the armor Tony first offered him several times on missions at this point, and Tony hopes he will transition over to it full-time because it's bulletproof and the flexicloth isn't.

"Is that a gun? And does that say capable of  _space travel_?"

Tony chuckles and glances at Bucky, who is working on his own arm in the corner of the lab Tony engineered for him. Bucky is squinting at the shoulder joint and using DUM-E as a hold to tweak a piece of circuitry, and has yet to address them.

“Yes, and yes. I’m calling it the Iron Spider armor.”

Peter's eyes are devouring the holo projection in front of him, intently taking in every technical detail, including the specs. Its spider-legs fan out behind it, making it look formidable, which was the plan. “It’s an upgrade of the one you showed me before, right?”

“Yeah. I figured it was about time we punched up your weaponry a bit, and you have full control over KAREN now so the baby monitoring stuff has been completely scrapped. It's all for you.”

Peter stills at those words. Those last words. Tony didn't mean anything by it--beyond what the words mean because it is true, that he did this all for Peter, but Peter looks kind of caught, kind of winded, and when he looks back at Tony the look in his eyes is just a variation of the way he looked at the suit's upgrades.

Hungry. Awed. All that's different is that he also looks hopeless, now.

There's no denying what it means.

Tony is... surprised. He'd wondered if any vestiges of Peter's crush might still linger despite his new relationship status, and suddenly he has his proof that they do. Matt didn’t magically vanish Peter’s feelings for Tony away; all it took was this little routine gift and Peter is back to acting like Tony is the reason sunsets happen. It might have been for the best if Matt had cured him of his feelings for Tony completely, but clearly that's not what has happened.

“Mr Stark... thank you so much. Really.”

It really is flattering, Tony has to admit. In a horribly inappropriate way, of course, but to be so deeply wanted that even another guy can't help rid Peter of his crush is... well. It would make anyone feel kind of special. It would make anyone feel kind of soft and flattered.

“Hey. It’s what I do. And you can stop thanking me for doing my job anytime.”

Tony pats him on top of his head, momentarily feeling the silky cushion of his hair. Peter stops his shudder a nanosecond after its onset, but too late to conceal it. Poor kid. So responsive to the slightest touch. Tony moves the hand to Peter’s shoulder, over the black _Star Wars_ tee with Darth Vader's helmet on it.

“You’re gonna make good use of this, right? Not overwork yourself?”

“N-no. I.” Peter exhales. “I promise.”

“Good.”

He drops the hand altogether, trying to cut Peter some slack.

“You’re meeting your Aunt for dinner, right?”

Peter blinks, like he forgot. “Oh. Right! Yeah, I should probably get going.” He runs a hand through his hair, clutching it in a clump for a second. Maybe it’s a sensitive area for him, even within how extra-sensitive he is everywhere. “I really appreciate it, Mr Stark. I. I won’t let you down; this suit is incredible.” He starts backing away, smiling. “Just... thank you.”

“What did I tell you about thanking me?”

“To keep doing it as often as I want?” he turns and starts to walk away faster, making Tony chuckle. “Bye, Mr Stark! By Bucky!”

And he’s gone.

Tony smiles down at his keyboard. It's a shame that Peter is still in love with him, but this little moment also served to establish that as far as suit upgrades go, the latest Iron Spider armor is clearly a success. Tony doesn’t want or expect reactions like Peter’s from the others about the painstaking work he puts into making their fighting gear better, but it’s still really goddamn  _nice_.

“Steve told me he mentioned it to you.”

He whips his head up.

Bucky still hasn’t looked away from what he’s working on, but he puts his tuning pencil down and grabs a micro-wrench.

“He didn’t want it to come off like he was accusing you of anything, by the way. Just... it’s a lot, you know? You’re a lot, for a kid like Peter to be around.”

Once again, the warm, delicately elated feeling in his chest immediately sours. Tony puts a hand on the counter in front of him, bracing himself.

“I’m ‘a lot’?” he echoes, voice carefully casual.

Bucky does look up this time. “You’re Iron Man, Tony." His tone is kind. "And everything that goes with it.”

"My bank account makes people lose their heads, is that what you're--"

"No, man. You're a hero. A charitable billionaire, yes, but one he's known for three years and who takes great pains to make him happy. To him, you're a rockstar who lives in his house--or I should say, a rockstar whose house he just moved into. We all see how much you care about him. Steve just meant... maybe don't let  _Peter_  see it, for a while."

He’s still careful around Tony; they both are, around each other. Which is why Tony isn't going to lash out for being called out a second time on things he barely has control over. Being asked to make Peter miserable, to be rude or less generous with him, to avoid him, even. Things he could never do.

“Is this your way of saying you’re crushin’ on me too, Barnes? ‘Cause I’ll go tell Steve right now.”

“Funny.”

Tony steps towards him. “Listen, Peter has a boyfriend now. That’s what's real. Not some high-school infatuation on the older guy who pays his bills.”

Bucky shrugs and turns back to his arm. He looks like he feels better after processing those words.

Tony isn’t sure why he himself doesn’t.

*

They practice combat drills by dividing into teams.

Sam jokingly suggests the Civil War factions, but Thor is here and they are missing T’Challa, Clint and Scott Lang, and anyway it would probably only reopen old wounds and go horribly wrong.

It ends up being Tony, Steve, Natasha, Vision and Sam against Thor, Rhodey, Wanda, Bucky and Peter, with Bruce refereeing. Everyone’s in their gear, for realism’s sake, and the enormous gym enclosure allows for flight so Sam joins Tony in the air to try to tackle the deadly combo that is Thor and Wanda, neither of whom require machinery to do what Sam and Tony can. There are only four concrete columns that don't impede their flight path in any significant way.

They are all pulling their punches, but some more than others. It’s still liberating, and chaotic, and good work. It’s being filmed and Director Fury is probably going to review the footage at some point to design his tactical maneuvers.

Several minutes in, Tony does a quick sweep across the room to take stock of how they are doing; they tend to pair off in combat, and today is no different. Sam is now fighting Bucky near the boxing ring, Nat and Vision are trying to do something about Thor and Wanda by the climbing ropes, and Steve is fighting Peter near the weight-lifting machinery.

Peter is holding his own, but he’s obviously trying to goad Steve into punching harder, keeping up a string of quippy one-liners and sharp commentary designed to rile Steve up. It’s not easy to rile Steve up, but it’s far from impossible; he’s combative by nature, and one just needs to know which buttons to push.

Tony moves his and Rhodey’s fight closer to where Peter is flinging webs at Steve to try to steal his shield again.

“…and they’d play videos of you talking at my high school even while you were a fugitive!”

Steve throws the shield at him with force, but Peter is agile enough to duck out of its way--and out of the way of the heavy weights that fall in thumps in his direction.

“Of course, no one knew you were really in it for the one guy... it sounded really noble at first, but the whole thing with Bucky kind of gave you away in the end!”

Tony dodges one of Rhodey’s shots and weaves even closer to the duo on the ground, watching Steve’s face intently. He’s starting to look annoyed, and the shield is back in his grip.

It wouldn’t be the first time one of them gets injured during a training drill.

“—meanwhile you were acting as if you were judge, jury and— _whoa_!”

The shield goes flying, harder and faster than it had before, just as Peter's back hits one of Wanda's stray levitated projectiles and gets knocked forward.

Tony swoops down and scoops Peter out of the path of danger, flying him up and away, almost to the ceiling.

“Tony, Peter is on the opposite team!” Bruce shouts, exasperated.

“Thanks, Mr Stark,” Peter gasps, panting from the exertion. He looks up at Tony’s mask, big eye slots widening. “I thought I was toast for sure.”

“So did I.”

“Tony!” Steve calls. “He okay?”

“He’s fine!”

He can feel the strong grip Peter has around his neck to stay semi-upright within the indignity of the bridal-carry Tony has him in.

The exercise wraps up not long after that, since Thor uses the confusion to essentially wipe everyone else out and gather them all in a defeated heap with his massive, muscled arms.

“Good job, everyone,” Steve says, clapping his hands. “You especially, Peter.”

“Come now,” Thor huffs. “Tell me truly: when did you all get together and make a deal to pretend that I am not the strongest among you?”

Peter grins, having taken off his mask. “Thanks, Steve.”

They start to file out towards the showers or directly to their rooms, but Tony hangs back to help Steve clean up the detritus, or at least move the heavier chunks of floor or ceiling that cleanup crews and the compound’s robotics won’t be able to handle. Peter stays, too, proving himself once again to be shockingly strong and endearingly helpful.

When Steve leaves (without a comment or even a pointed look, this time) Tony looks up at Peter and knows immediately that he hung back on purpose. Peter has that look again, determined and a little worried, that signals he wants to talk.

“Mr Stark?”

“Yeah.”

“I... wanted to ask you something?”

It’s not even the first time Peter has done this in the past week, but something about his tone, this time...

The familiar words echo across years of scenes just like it: after a lecture, after a press conference, after a speech, after a meeting. Some not-as-naive-as-they-look ingénue lingering behind, shrugging their shoulders carefully, batting their eyelashes at him...  _I wanted to ask you something. I have a question about the lecture. I’d like to clarify one of the points you made_. That’s why Tony can’t help the comparison now. It’s. Inevitable to draw the parallel.

He takes an instinctive, staggering step back. “If a new mission comes up, I promise you’ll be the first to know, Parker.”

“No, it’s...” A corner of his mouth lifts. “It’s not that. I was wondering how... if it’s okay for us to. How does it work if—for dating? When I want to go out on a date."

"...This is about Matt."

"Um, yeah. We haven’t really... actually gone out, before."

Right. They've been 'staying in'. "And I take it you started seeing each other back when you lived in Queens."

"Y-yeah. It's only been a couple of months, and it's still pretty casual, but... I'm sorry I snuck him in, I know that was a security breach. In general, when one of us is dating someone, how does that happen? Like, do I need your permission, or--"

Tony says: “Yes.”

“...Oh.”

Peter looks a little taken aback, but far from shocked or disbelieving. He’d do it. He would ask for Tony’s permission every time he wanted to see that guy.

“As a courtesy to the team, I mean,” Tony adds, molding his tone into something casually friendly. “For on-call and patrolling schedules. And in case you’re seen in public and we get asked about it.”  _Peter would have patiently waited for Tony to allow him to go out._  “It’s allowed for you to date civilians, obviously. We’ve all done it.” He feels vaguely nauseous. “Is there a reason you’re asking me today, in particular?”

“Well, we were gonna go out later this week. He was going to pick me up here.” He looks cautiously at Tony. “If that’s okay with you, sir.”

The ‘sir’ is really the absolute worst of it.

“That’s just fine, Peter.” He wipes at the side of his neck where he can feel a bead of sweat rolling down the hinge of his jaw; the suit’s heat-dissipation is working perfectly, but can’t completely cancel out a workout-induced metabolic temperature rise. “He knows the location already, and I want you to feel like the compound is your home. I want you to be happy here.”

"Thanks, Mr Stark," comes the faint reply. Peter’s gaze dipped down towards Tony's neck and has stayed there.

He looks more flushed than he did right after the exercise. This is probably one of those times that count as Tony ‘not helping’ him, per Steve’s implication, even though Tony didn't choose how his body regulates the temperature.

He hits the ‘retract’ function on the Iron Man and watches Peter’s face as his suit peels back to reveal some simple high-tech sporting gear.

Peter’s mouth drops slightly open. "Um... what?"

"I didn't say anything."

"Oh."

Tony realizes that he’s actively encouraging this at this point. “All right, just let me know when it happens. See you at dinner.”

He leaves, feeling overheated.

*

He swishes two fingers around and downs them in one, that night.

A preemptive measure, is all. He’s not thinking about anything in particular.

*

They have a busy week.

It’s a coincidence—they don't have a new mission, but the nanotech weaponry programming is advancing in leaps and bounds, and Tony always offers Peter the opportunity to help out in the lab. It just so happens there have been more opportunities than usual over the next few days.

Peter takes him up on it every single time, which is par for the course because he used to before, as well (it’s unclear to Tony at this time what exactly he’s referencing by ‘before’). Tony doesn’t ask about Peter’s upcoming date and Peter doesn’t seem to be thinking about it very much, since he invariably agrees to stay up late with Tony, always at his beck and call.

“And how would you account for friction?”

“Within the fabric itself or for flight?”

“Both. Start with the fabric itself.”

Peter grabs one of the equations floating in the air to his right and drags it to the middle of the holoboard.

“We could make it distributive...” he mumbles, typing in the air, tossing numbers to the side as needed. “But inner thighs and under arms are obviously the places with the most...”

Tony watches him carefully, and walks over to his side, following along as he idly scratches his beard.

“I’d... I’d line the inseam down to the knee with additional glide functionality, probably.” Peter steals a look at him sideways. Sometimes he checks in on Tony to see if he approves, but he’s done it less and less as the years have gone by, and anyway this isn’t that. The words come out clear, but his telltale blush is creeping up his neck. “The armpit, down the side of the chest, and down to the elbow, too.”

“Would you have to program the bots individually?”

“Of course not.” He types a series of commands, gets an error the first time. Tony feels the brush of his elbow as he quickly types out his mistake, diagnosing where he went wrong and running the command again. “I. Like this?”

“You tell me.” He’s impressed, in truth. He always is.

“I think this would work.” He amplifies the holo of himself in the Iron Spider suit until letters appear that flash a polite, neon-yellow ‘TO SCALE’ above its head. Its feet touch the floor now; it’s like he’s looking at a suited-up mirror of himself, except Peter’s ears are red, and his holo is masked and see-through. “Here, and... h-here...” He bends a little to highlight the areas where the friction could be a problem in his thighs.

Tony steps around the projection to help him and gently lifts the holo’s arms to the sides, so that it looks a little startled. He draws his fingers from its projected elbows towards the armpits, careful but businesslike, efficiently painting them in neon highlighter with his thumb. He follows the path down to the side of holographic-Peter’s chest, the sides of his ribcage. A real person would flinch, tickled or sensitized there, but the hologram remains frozen in place.

He’s not looking, but he can hear Peter breathing in front of him, and he knows Peter stopped what he was doing. All this talk of inner thighs and the imagery—Tony is standing behind what is essentially a faceless replica of Peter, sliding his hands down its sides. It looks like... Tony gets what it looks like. Tony gets that he needs to stop immediately, or overload poor Peter’s circuitry.

_You’re killing him with all that—_

He stops.

Peter’s eyes look glassy, desperate. He stares at Tony for a beat longer than he should, and then he looks at the floor. He’s holding his entire frame very carefully, as though if he didn’t have a strict lock on his muscles they would tremble.

“I think that should do it.”

“Mh-hm.” Peter’s lips are pressed tightly together. Was this little episode enough to get him—Tony stops the thought. He’s eighteen. A national geographic documentary is probably enough to get him—

“You okay?”

Peter flings a pleading look his way. “Fine.” His voice breaks on the word. It’s always sounded endearing to Tony’s ears, when it gets high like that. Tony pretends he didn’t notice. He pretends nothing is wrong, because really, not much is. Technically.

“...You sure?”

“Yes. Thanks, Mr Stark.”

“You wanna keep going?” He clears his throat. “With the programming? Or do you—“ he shouldn’t give him the choice; Peter always chooses to stay. Tony needs to be the adult. He  _is_  the older adult. “You should take off, actually. We did a lot of good work today.”

As predicted, Peter looks crestfallen. “Oh, no, please Mr Stark, I wanna keep going. I wanna stay.”

“No, you’re done. I’m cutting you off.” He throws Peter a small smirk so he gets that it’s a deliberate reference, and not a mean-spirited one at that. “Come on, Peter. I’m sure you have better things to do.”

“I don’t.”

It’s... grossly sincere. Enough to make a better man feel lightheaded, with all this open adoration.  _You’re killing him with—_

“You should.” He walks through the holo and discards the projection with a wave of his hand, inadvertently darkening the light around them, casting deeper shadows across Peter’s features. Peter looks up at him, plainly, painfully worshipful. “You should have better things.”

“I like it down here.”

“And you’re always welcome to come back. But it’s time to take a break.”

The words seem to have a strong impact. After a moment's serious contemplation, Peter heaves a heavy, shaky breath. He squares his muscled shoulders, nodding. “You're right.” 

He looks bitterly resolute, and suddenly the oldest he's ever looked in Tony's eyes. It takes Tony aback; Peter has always had more depth and maturity than anyone his age should, but the look on his face now is actively punching Tony in the chest with it.

“I'm going to meet Matt for dinner. Happy said he was driving into the city in a few minutes.”

Tony swallows past something in his throat. “FRIDAY, make sure Happy doesn’t leave without Peter.”

“ _You got it, sir_.”

Peter gives him one last look before leaving. He opens his mouth slightly, about to apologize.

“I’ll see you later, Peter.”

“...Okay. Yeah. See you later, Mr Stark.”

*

“Our little Spidey’s on a date?” Sam asks, delighted. He reacted the way Rhodey did—the way everyone else did. Delight, relief, an offhand comment to Tony about how he must be so glad this happened.

Steve smiles from where he’s cleaning dishes on the sink. “I think it’s great. We should be encouraging Peter to spend less time locked up in here with us. I know he snapchats his friends all the time and they send each other videos, but it’s not the same as him spending time with people his age.”

Peter actually generally dislikes spending time with fellow teenagers, he told Tony once. It just serves to remind him of how different he is from them, and he feels off-footed, like he missed out on some things and couldn’t make himself care about others. Tony doesn’t say any of this.

“I think we should let Peter do whatever he wants,” Natasha says to Tony, while Steve and Sam debate better uses of Peter’s scarce free time. At the table, Bruce is talking to Wanda and Vision about Thor’s new girlfriend, Valkyrie, who sounds like she may have a drinking problem.

“It’s not our job to set an example?” Tony mutters.

She chuckles darkly, her voice like velvet. “What kind of example are any of us capable of setting, Tony?” Her eyes drift pointedly to the table. Bruce is trying to describe what it feels like to drink altering substances to Vision, with Wanda’s help.

“So there’s no hope?”

She leans towards him, elbows on the counter. Tony holds her gaze.

“Not what I said. But Peter has a mind of his own, and he’s smarter and more mature than half the guys give him credit for.” She blinks up at him. "You're his touchstone here. Just don't forget that he's his own person, and makes his own choices. We can give him advice, but we can't parent him. If anyone had tried to parent me at his age after all the shit he's been through I'd have garroted them.  _That's_  what I'm saying."

*

Peter doesn't come back with Happy at midnight; apparently Matt has a self-driving Stark car and Peter sends Happy back with the message that he'll make his own way to the compound. 

Tony hangs out in the kitchen long past everyone else’s bedtime—which is saying something, since Natasha can’t sleep before 1 a.m. But the kitchen bar seems as good a place as any to work on his updated suit designs, and he has ready access to the scotch that’s hopefully going to help him pass out at some point tonight.

That the kitchen is a waypoint for access to all the bedrooms is something that does occur to him.

He feels the right kind of drunk. Buzzed and overheated but not clumsy yet; if anything he’s smoother, more agile, faster, he flows as he types and makes corrections to his formulas, satisfied with the work, a touch reckless but in a good way for what he’s trying to accomplish. It's a balancing act to maintain that level of inebriation, but he's occasionally good at those.

*

Time passes, and he starts to seriously consider just suiting up and tracking Peter as Iron Man with his drones.

*

He's the one who pushed Peter into this fucking date, and he regrets it now. He's man enough to admit it to himself: he regrets this. He wishes this never happened. If Tony had just let him hang out in the lab, Peter would have been delighted to just be around him, to be just around him. Peter would be here, now.

Peter. Here. Now.

*

FRIDAY says: “ _Incoming_ ,” softly, almost kindly, just seconds before the door opens and Peter walks into the living room.

“Mr Stark.”

He looks surprised. He’s staring at Tony with delight, though—like it’s the best kind of surprise to see him. That’s how he always looks at Tony, now that he thinks about it. Fuck. Something else Tony can admit to himself: it feels so fucking  _nice_  to be greeted with that expression every day.

“Hey.” He puts his glass down with a 'clink'. “Hi, kid.”

“Hi.” Peter walks up to the other side of the bar and takes a seat. He leans his elbows against the glass counter. Tony forgets which interior designer he booked for the compound, but he should probably revisit all this glass. “You’re still up,” he comments. His eyes are guileless, expectant. Admiring, even.

“Obviously. I had work.”

Peter doesn’t berate him for it, or make a quip about work needing to be done at three in the morning. He just takes it in stride as something important. “What are you working on?”

His eyes can’t have missed the bottle, or the glass.

Tony's eyes certainly haven't missed the unruly twist of his hair, or the fact that his _USS Enterprise_ shirt is rumpled in places that don't rumple naturally.

“I'm working on getting drunk and solving a heat-dispersion issue with the nanotech so we don’t have to plug our suits into a charging station.”

“Seems like a—“

“How was your date?” Tony interrupts. “You have fun?”

Peter’s soft mouth drops open in surprise. He just breathes for a long moment. “I-I… yeah.”

“What’d you do?”

It’s three in the fucking morning.

“We. A movie.”

“Was it ‘How Yukong Moved the Mountains’?”

Somehow, the fact that Peter gets the reference is awful. “Isn’t that like, twelve hours long?” he says, snorting. “No. We—sorry I’m late.”

“What did you do?” he asks again. It comes out harsher than he meant it to, though he doesn't know how he meant it to sound originally.

Peter swallows, obviously noticing the change in atmosphere. He looks flushed again, nervous—no, not nervous, it’s never really  _nervous_ ; he looks turned on. Is there no goddamn crazy, fucked up thing Tony can do that he won’t like?

Tony stands up, and Peter trembles. His hands are flat on the bar counter, expectant.

“I.”

Tony doesn’t feel the right kind of drunk anymore; he wishes he were completely sober. Or completely trashed to the point where he were numb. Peter’s cheeks are splotchy pink, and that doesn’t—he’s breathing fast. His chest his heaving. His forearms are corded with muscle, his narrow waist invites a firm grip, and Tony isn't blind; he sees what Matt must have seen, the gut-wrenching appeal Peter holds at any given moment and this one in particular.

“We were just hanging out, Mr Stark.”

He’s not angry at Peter. He’s not angry at all, he’s just. He’s desperate. He’s so fucking desperate.

“Okay. Gotcha.” He walks around the bar, careful so he won’t stumble. “Listen, m'gonna go to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Peter watches him go with wide eyes, hands still on the counter, breathing jaggedly.


	3. Jade

He impulse-buys a state-of-the-art videogame center for Peter’s room right before falling asleep, swimming in guilt about what just happened, or didn’t. To formally apologize (and if Peter asked “For what?” what would he reply, exactly?) would mean to give their strained interaction a name, and Tony can’t help but feel that that will make things worse.

A voice in his head says: _Steve would not approve_. The voice sounds like it pities him; it sounds like Pepper.

He programs a little subroutine so that his household bots will install it when it arrives and emails a member of the house staff to double-check it was assembled correctly, and doesn’t sign it or write a note to tape to the enormous TV screen because Peter will know who it’s from. Because he’s the only person in Peter’s life who can afford to gift him with such gaudy extravagances.

If he had written a note, though, it might have said something really, really stupid, like: _h_ _ave fun hanging out - TS ~~~~_

*

Tony wakes up feeling ashamed and unworthy—and there’s a joke to be made about Thor’s old hammer in there but he’s too fucking embarrassed to even attempt it.

But he pads downstairs barefoot and encounters a portion of the team having either a very late breakfast or a very early lunch. Peter is there, and he’s asking Thor about the Asgardian colony and interplanetary travel and, Tony is pretty sure, trying to politely get himself invited to visit outer space.

“Morning, Tony,” says Steve.

“Morning.” Tony walks over to the coffee maker. He’s a man with a plan. The plan is coffee.

“Stark, you missed Natasha’s message that she is departing for the Ukraine,” says Thor. “Barnes left with her.”

“Well. I hear it’s beautiful this time of year.”

“Good morning Mr Stark.”

“...Good morning, Peter.” He flicks the switch so that coffee starts to brew and turns around, glancing at Peter briefly. Peter meets his eyes and gives him a tentative look, or a cautious one. Tony isn’t sure how to return it, so he speaks instead. “You want some coffee?”

Peter’s eyes drop to the coffee cup in front of him. He smiles, lopsided. “I’m all set.”

“Right.” He feels like a bumbling, old fool. It’s not a feeling he’s used to, but this kid--

“I’ll take some,” says Sam, waving.

“You got it, birdie.”

They discuss the next batch of SHIELD cadets that are coming in for training at the compound, and Tony and Steve make plans to get together to prepare the drills.

After he’s done with breakfast, Tony makes for the lab. He wants to move along the development of Peter’s armor, and he also has overseas contacts he wants on standby in case Nat and Bucky need backup.

“Mr Stark!”

He should have figured.

“Yeah.” He turns around. The day is bright, and their corridor is made up of glass walls on one side that let the midday sunlight flood in.

Peter’s shorts are ridiculous, and should be banned. Probably are, in some states. He’s also wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt that still manages not to fit him, hanging loose around the waist. The striking angles of his face, his collarbones are highlighted by the light, and his silky hair gleams.

“I wanted to thank you for my present, Mr Stark. I showed the console and VR specs to Ned and he flipped out.” He smiles. “I think he’s gonna visit sooner thanks to that. To you.”

“I’m glad.” He pushes his sunglasses up his nose. “Did your aunt ‘flip out’?”

Peter looks rueful. “Kind of, but in a good way. She sees all these gifts and upgrades as, like... the least I deserve.” He sighs. “Which isn’t... I mean, I’m not sure what the occasion was, but you really didn’t have to--”

“I never have to, but you’re the only one who seems to feel some type of way about these things. Bruce’s seven PhDs don’t pay for his car, or his plane tickets, but you don’t hear him complaining.”

Peter shrugs. “It still feels like I didn’t earn any of it.”

“Wait, hang on... I think we’ve had this conversation before.” He pretends to think about it. “Yup, we’ve definitely covered this in the past." He gives Peter a stern look. "You earned everything you have by existing, by being yourself. By doing what you do.”

It makes Peter flush with pleasure, which might have been Tony’s absolute favorite thing to do in another universe where--in another world.

“Thanks, Mr Stark.” Peter shuffles. “So, um, can I ask you a—“

“Ask away, kid,” Tony interrupts, generously cutting him off. He doesn’t need to be thinking about his stupid precedent; Peter never actually means it that way. "You know the answer is probably gonna be 'yes', if you even had to ask."

Peter smiles tentatively, with half of his mouth. “Well, I was—I was gonna invite Matt to hang out at the compound, tomorrow. If that’s okay with you... guys.”

Tony gives him a tight smile in return. He tries to sound teasing: “Hang out, hm?”

Peter’s ears turn red. “Um.”

“It’s okay, Peter.” He tries to make the smile wider, friendlier. Peter is an adult. Peter is an adult, who is getting over him in whichever way he sees fit. “And yes. Of course you can bring your friend to the compound. I already told you how I hoped you’d feel about your room there; all I want is for you to be comfortable.”

Peter returns the smile with a full one of his own. He seems relieved. “You’re the best, Mr Stark.” He starts to turn away.

“Far from it, kid.” _Far fucking from it._ And then, because he can’t help himself: “I imagine it feels a little isolated, being here in the compound.”

Peter stops mid-step, and turns back around to face him. “Isolated? There’s five or six of us around at any given time. A-and the staff, and the SHIELD people who come and go... and the new recruits who are coming in, and--”

“Still, I should have... I would imagine you might want company. I could arrange for your friends to visit, if that’s--I told you I had pull at MIT, we can kidnap your girl MJ from there in a second, if you want. And Ned Leeds should just enroll in my computer science program directly, to be honest--”

“I’m not isolated.” Peter steps towards him. Down below, near the tarmac, a group of SHIELD techs is greeting an incoming vehicle. They don’t ever come up to the Avengers level. “I have you guys.” He gives Tony a considering look. “...The reason I want Matt to come over isn’t that I feel isolated.”

He’s too fucking smart.

“I wasn’t suggesting--”

“I think you were.” He doesn’t look angry, or sad. He just looks vaguely puzzled; eyebrows drawn in. “I. Is it...?” He takes a breath. “Did I do something, Mr Stark?”

“No. God no, Peter, I just want to be sure you’re...” he motions vaguely at Peter’s frame. “That you’re happy here. Like I said.”

Peter’s smile comes back. “Well... I am. Thanks to you.” He nods, and walks back the way he came from.

This time Tony lets him go.

*

It’s a rainy Sunday. Tony is going to leave for Seoul tonight to show his face at a Stark Industries event and meet up with Helen Cho to discuss further development of her healing capsule. He has important things to focus on. None of them are the fact that Peter and Matt are in Peter’s bedroom playing video games on Peter’s new console (Tony walked past them; the door was open) right now.

So. The computer screen in front of his face can come into focus any second now.

Rhodey closes the book he was reading.

“He’s not actually your kid.”

Tony’s gaze snaps up to look at him.

“ _What_?”

“You heard me.” Rhodey sighs. He propped his feet up on the larger beige couch and took off his walking aides to do so, but readjusts his seat now like his back is sore. “You think I don’t see you? That I don’t get what’s going on? How goddamn long have we known each other, Tony?” Tony opens his mouth to answer but Rhodey keeps talking. “Look, I don’t know what’s got you feeling all Father of the Year, but you’ve gotta stop, man. It’s getting creepy.”

The rain outside is inaudible, but Tony feels like he can suddenly hear it roaring in his ears. “I’m not—“

“You can’t fool me. You can fool the others; not me.” Rhodey shoots him a weary look. “Peter Parker is some kid you met three years ago. He was raised by his aunt. He’s not… yours to worry about like that. And he’s a goddamned adult, anyway.”

“He.” Tony swallows. “He looks up to me. He doesn’t mind when I—“

“Of course he doesn’t mind. He more than looks up to you, Tony; that kid _worships_ you—you blink in his direction, and he’ll come running. But that doesn’t mean you should. You get that, right?”

“I... of course I do.” He stands up. When did he decide to do that? He’s clutching his laptop in a vice-like grip in his left hand, and Rhodey is looking up at him with his most pitying expression, and Tony needs to not be here anymore. “I know I come off as a bit protective, but I’m the one who got him wrapped up in all this—“

“That was three years ago,” Rhodey says again. “He’s made choice after choice since then, many of those contrary to your designs, by the way. I’d say ‘let him be a little irresponsible’, but it’s not your job to ‘let him be’ anything.”

Tony just stands there for a moment. He just stands there and looks at Rhodey and breathes.

“...Listen man, I’ve gotta go pack for Seoul.”

“Since when do you pack your own luggage?”

“Christ, leave me alone.” But he flicks the side of Rhodey’s head when he passes the back of the couch Rhodey’s sitting on, to show that he’s not mad. He just needs to breathe.

“Just think about what I’m saying!” Rhodey calls after him.

“You’re my better angel, Rhodes!”

Fate is not so kind as to allow for a break, however. Tony hops up the couple of steps leading to the first-floor corridors and is greeted with a sight he wasn't expecting.

The door to Peter’s bedroom is shut.

He ends up pausing in front of it. He’s sure it was ajar when Peter and Matt were playing video games before. He made a mental note of the fact, didn’t he? There’s no such thing as a breeze in the perfectly sealed, programmable, semi-automated Avengers compound. Which means they deliberately stood up and closed it.

Well.

It’s not Tony’s job to parent Peter, Rhodey says. Peter is legally an adult now—he’s old enough to make his own decisions, his own mistakes. He’s old enough to try move on in any way he wants.

The perfectly sealed, programmable, semi-automated Avengers compound has airtight sound proofing, so he can’t hear anything unless he deliberately logs into FRIDAY’s surveillance module. Which he won’t.

But.

Something hot and unwelcome is climbing up Tony’s spine. He could knock on the door. He could interrupt—whatever is going on in there, he could—he could say he needs Peter in the lab. Or for patrol. He could pretend he wasn’t expecting there to be anything to interrupt. He doesn’t think about why, he just considers... he has that option. He could.

He doesn’t; instead he goes up to his room in the middle of the afternoon and takes swigs of scotch directly from the bottle, feeling looser and looser until his very joints seem unwound, and he starts out packing but ends up face-down on his bed, angry and dizzy and sick at nothing and everything, but particularly sick at himself.

Sonia finds him like that, and ‘tut-tut’s at him in a motherly and practical fashion, and helps him finish stuffing a few belongings in his suitcase along with one of the household mechs.

“What is into you, Mr Stark?” she asks in her accented English, offhand because she doesn’t particularly care about the answer.

“I’m a bad man, Sonia.”

Sonia shrugs, allowing this. “What matters is you keep trying to be better.”

 _But I’m failing_ , Tony thinks. Sonia gives him a dispassionate pat on the shoulder before she goes back to her cleaning cart. _I’m failing._

“ _Tony, your flight to Seoul leaves in thirty minutes_ ,” FRIDAY tells him.

Tony gets up.

*

Seoul grows more beautiful every time Tony visits. He loves the city, and has always loved traveling, and cannot fathom why he’s still in one of the worst moods of his life. He thought getting away from the compound would help, but it hasn’t.

And now he’s staring at a minibar that will definitely make him feel worse.

Matt came off as a blond jock the second time, too, is the thing. There is nothing wrong with that stereotype, but it served to remind Tony of Thor even more, and it is at this point _puzzling_ to him how completely unlike Tony himself Peter’s first boyfriend is. And yes, Helen invited him to drinks with her lab associates and yes, the News Director for the main TV network in the city asked Tony to drop in at an after-party tonight and yes, Tony has ignored both these opportunities in favor of drunkenly contemplating the physical appearance of the man his mentee is dating.

He pours himself some scotch.

Peter will slowly but surely get over him. It’s already started; it took him forever to date someone but he finally did, and his feelings for Tony are lingering, but that’s it. Soon, he’ll make moony eyes at Matt alone, and he’ll look back at his crush on Tony as a ridiculous high-school phase.

He pours himself some more.

Matt might be a rebound or he might be Peter’s future. It doesn’t matter. Someone who isn’t Tony is going to get to pick Peter up and kiss him for the rest of their lives one day. Peter is amazing; there will be a line of people wanting to be that someone. Tony drinks another gulp as he walks around the room alone, unable to hurt anybody else in this enormous, beautiful penthouse at the luxury Park Hyatt Seoul hotel.

“ _Tony... are you okay_?” Helen had asked, putting a hand gently on his arm.

“ _Yup, all good. Thanks, doc_.”

He tosses the empty container and presses a hand against the glass window panel, looking out at the lights outside. Neon pinks and blues and yellows and reds flash brightly below, shimmering ads and movie trailers on enormous screens.

He drinks from another bottle; rum this time, which he hates, but he finished the scotch.

Steve and Bucky would be proud that he’s not calling Peter right now, even though it would just be to hear Peter’s voice; just because he likes the sound of it. But Peter might find it harder to fall out of love with him if Tony calls him even when he’s far away, and Steve and Bucky think Tony is too nice to Peter. Too much. _A lot_ , Bucky said. _We all see how much you care about him_ , Bucky said.

 _You’re killing him_ , Steve said.

Much as he wants to, Tony isn’t going to initiate a video-chat just so that he can see Peter’s face; just because he likes Peter’s expressions, his eyes, the quirks of his mouth. Peter would be reminded of how much Tony cares for him, and it might undo the progress he’s been making towards getting over his crush.

Steve and Bucky would be proud that Tony is getting morbidly drunk by himself and not contacting Peter to tell him—

His phone lights up with an alert.

Tony drops his knee onto the mattress, waits a beat for his vision to catch up to the shift in angle, and then picks it up. The screen blurs in front of his eyes, dark letters on a bright white backdrop, nonsensical for several moments.

Suddenly FRIDAY’s voice overrides the lock screen: “ _Tony, an alien spacecraft is heading towards Argentina and has been classified as a Category III, unfriendly. The Avengers are assembling_.”

Tony scrambles upright, head spinning but system flooding with adrenalin.

“Roster,” he rasps, grabbing for his suit, ready to push the long-distance flight capability to its utmost.

“ _Captain America, Sca_ _rlet Witch, Spider-Man, Vision, Falcon, Hulk, Thor_ —“

But he stops listening, because it just hit him that he’s drunk. He’s more than drunk, he is trashed, and worse off than he has been in a long time.

He installed a failsafe in the suit so that it wouldn’t work with his blood alcohol level what it is now. There is no override to the program. He cycles and then re-cycles through the different possibilities at lightning speed, trying to think of how, how he can—but he can’t defeat himself. The failsafe is foolproof; FRIDAY will instantly know she needs to run the Daytime Barfly protocol.

He is trapped. He is trapped, and they are in danger.

*

At least he knows that this is it. He always knows the second his ass hits rock bottom.

 _Fuck_.

*

He has to ask Maria to send over the nearest Helicarrier-adjacent vessel to take him directly to Argentina. The crew is divided between those who are pissed off to have been redirected off their course to pick him up and those who are utterly awed at his presence, but Tony has time for neither. He overrides the safety cap so they can push the speed limit for the aircraft and sets up a remote access to the SHIELD video feed of the battle.

He gets to watch, with mounting horror, as his team engages in a brutal fight for their lives and the lives of the people of Buenos Aires. And it’s not even in HD.

The vessel was from Dornland, an alien species that were hoping to kill the King of Asgard in order to subjugate his newly weakened people. They miscalculated their landing by a few countries, but their hostile intentions are clear the second they start blowing shit up on sight. Once in a while Tony sees a red-white-and-blue blur that might be Steve, or a flash of red static that might be Wanda, and Thor’s lightning causes electric interference with the camera feed so he knows when that happens too. He thinks he sees a tiny, far-off blip with spider-legs moving fast, but he could be imagining it. There’s too much smoke, and then the military arrives and doubles the amount of explosions per square meter.

His ship is still two hours away by the time the battle is over.

The Avengers are able to not only defeat the Dornland hostiles, but send them running back in their spaceship and away from Earth. The SHIELD crew cheers when the official message from Fury comes through, and it’s rare that they get such a fast and clear-cut victory, but Tony can’t cheer yet.

His phone lights up with a call.

“Maria. Tell me.”

“ _Stark, everyone’s made it so far, but Spider-Man was hit._ ”

She patiently waits (or, keeps barking orders through her headset) while he gets himself together. He sits down, or falls down and there happens to be a chair under him when he does. It takes him several moments to ask her to elaborate, to get her to tell him what happened.

“ _I don’t know the details, Stark, I’m not there_ —“

“What _do_ you know?”

“ _He needs surgery and we are transporting him back to the US on one of Helen’s medical ships, he is already getting care_ —“

“The compound is the best place for him.” Tony stands up and takes out his other phone, sending commands to FRIDAY to initiate the emergency medical care alert and get a team of doctors to New York immediately. He nudges a SHIELD tech away from their computer while he talks, mouthing for them to tell the pilot there’s been a change of course. “Make sure he ends up there.”

“ _I will_.”

“Mr Tony Stark?” the tech asks, with just a touch of awe. “The pilot will want to know where the new course—“

“We’re going to New York, not Buenos Aires anymore. Tell the pilot it’s my fault. Tell her I’ll answer any questions or concerns she has about it.”

The kid rushes out without questioning him.

He’s been awake for two days at this point, like that matters. He sets everything in motion and when he finally runs out of things to do or teammates to try to call he goes to the bathroom and throws up. 

*

Peter is already in surgery by the time Tony makes it to New York, hours later.

*

Thor called in a friend of his who is a doctor to help.

Turns out he’s a doctor and a _wizard_.

*

Tony does a lot of pacing, and sitting down, and pacing, and sitting down, and he’s completely sober by this point but still too nauseous to eat no matter what stats Vision rattles off about humans and their minimum average calorie intake.

Steve and Sam are in a similar state as he is because they were there when Peter got crushed under the mammoth-like alien and couldn’t prevent it, so they have nothing to say. Thor was also there but he is dealing with it by being stubbornly, desperately optimistic, like he always does--one simply needs to know to look in his eyes, where the fear lurks.

Bruce became the Hulk during the battle and has yet to revert back to being Dr Banner; SHIELD has him contained in his quarantined sector of the compound. Vision and Wanda are dealing with Fury, Maria and the press.

Thor’s friend is called Dr Strange and he is still in the operating room, helping to direct the surgeons, and hopefully using his powers to help Peter heal.

“Tony.”

The doors to the medical facility within the compound aren’t made of glass, which is the one thing Tony wishes was see-through in this place. There are benches lining the corridor that leads up to the med floor with floor-to-ceiling windows to let in the bright sunshine and look out towards the greenery of the outdoors, but the sunshine reminds Tony of the kid in his ridiculous Wonder Woman shirt thanking him for a fucking video-game console, and being too insightful while he was at it.

“Hey, Tony.”

He didn’t even get to see Peter before they took him. Maybe Peter was still awake before they put him under. Maybe he would have liked to see Tony there.

“Tony, come on,” Rhodey mutters, putting an arm around his shoulders and walking him down the corridor, away from the others before adding: “Walk with me,” like an afterthought.

Tony follows him.

Rhodey curls his fingers around Tony’s white button-down by the shoulder, clutching the fabric in his grip. Tony’s been wearing it for fifty hours, unbuttoned at this point but still. He should probably change.

“I talked to Steve, about this whole Peter thing.”

Tony is going to fucking _lose it_.

“Now is not the goddamn time, Rhodes—“

“No, no, Tony,” Rhodey grips him even harder, hurting him. He stops and rounds on him to look at him face to face. There’s a security guy a few feet away who probably can’t hear them, but is definitely looking. “Listen to me. Steve loves you, but he doesn’t always get you, okay? He didn’t think you’d...” he chuckles, bitterly. “He didn’t know you’d immediately take on three tons worth of guilt about an offhand comment he barely meant.”

“Rhodey...”

“He didn’t know. And I probably made it worse the other day, and I’m sorry. But it’s not even a little bit your fault, how Peter feels about you. It’s not.”

Tony looks into his dark, gorgeously lashed eyes. Rhodey is staring at him with a furious intensity.

“It’s not, okay? Stop blaming yourself for everything that happens to that kid. Today... Peter saved fifty people by going up against that monster. Fifty people are alive because of the choice he made. And that choice had fuck-all do with you.”

“I know.” Tony’s shoulders ache from keeping him up. Will Rhodey think he’s gone completely batshit crazy if he has a full-on dry-heaving breakdown, or will he just call Pepper? “Rhodey, I—“

But then:

“Someone get them back—“

“Tony!”

“ _Tony, the surgery is over_ ,” FRIDAY booms over the general speakers of the house. He may have forgotten to tell her not to make a general announcement over the entire Avengers compound. “ _Peter is alive.”_

There’s a commotion back in the medical bay—Tony and Rhodey rush back just in time to see the doctor emerge through the double doors, accompanied by a small group of people in scrubs. Tony recognizes two of the nurses from some of his own previous visits to the med bay.

“Strange,” Thor rasps. “Tell us.”

“He is well. It went well, and I expect he’ll make a full recovery.”

In Tony’s own defense, he makes it all the way to his room before collapsing with relief.

*

“Okay, everyone needs to stop being so dramatic?” Peter grins, loopy and pale from his own bed. "I'm fine."

The Avengers are gathered around him, all of them, including Nat and Bucky who came back from their side-mission as soon as they heard what happened. It took Peter two days to wake up and, according to Dr Strange, it took a lot of drugs to keep him asleep. A lot. His gaze takes a couple of extra seconds to focus and he is, adorably, high as a kite.

Tony stands between Steve and Bruce, watching Peter for signs of pain.

"You guys," Peter mumbles. His bedsheets cover him up to his chest, but his arms are free and Tony sees him lift a couple of fingers with effort. "Seriously. I'm feeling really great, and I know the debrief starts soon, and I don't want Ross t'be mad at me. He already hates me 'cause I'm... the age that I am."

"Ross can wait," Steve says firmly.

"He's the Secretary of State," Peter counters weakly. "I feel like that's kind of a big deal?"

"He can wait," Sam echoes. His tone brokers no room for doubt.

"But I'll feel bad if you stay," Peter tells them. "I'll feel guilty. Jus'... come back after, okay?"

"Peter... that was a really stupidly brave thing you did," Natasha says, putting a hand on Peter's bicep. "You saved a bunch of people; they told you right?"

Peter smiles, slow and grateful. "They did. Thanks, Nat."

She nods. "Okay. Good. Then we'll be back to remind you as soon as the debrief is over."

One by one, they touch Peter's arm, or his shin, or, in Wanda's case, they kiss his forehead. Vision carefully curls Peter's fingers into a fist and then softly bumps it against his own, smiling gently at him.

Tony stays where he is, and to his relief Steve nods at him with approval as soon as he realizes Tony isn't coming with them to the debrief. Sam throws him two thumbs up as well. Rhodey looks entirely unsurprised and simply gives him a knowing look. Natasha gives him a grateful nod, a kind of 'if you weren't going to, I was' look.

Finally, they all leave, and Tony is the only one left.

Peter's room is very big, as all rooms at the compound are, and one of its walls overlooks the outside, as most spaces in the compound do. At this time of year in September the sun is starting to set sooner, and there's already an orange tint to the light flowing in. Peter's Star Wars posters hang above a bookshelf filled with tomes ranging from sci-fi fiction to biochemistry, and a few comic books thrown in. The massive, sleek gaming system Tony just bought him is set up around a plasma television screen the size of a ping pong table. His desk has a little Lego TIE-fighter on it. In just a couple of weeks, Peter's knick-knacks and personal touches have made the space his.

"Debriefs are mandatory for the whole team, even the ones who weren't on the mission. You can't stay, Mr Stark."

"Ross will live without knowing I watched you guys kick ass from a TV screen. You're more important."

Peter considers this, and then tips his head to the side to meet Tony's gaze. He has dark bags under his eyes, and his face is white as a sheet, but he's alive and Tony has never been more grateful for anything.

He has also never felt less like ever having another drink.

“Um, Mr Stark,” Peter murmurs. “Can I ask you a favor?”

“Whatever you want,” Tony rasps, staring back at him. "Always, Peter. Whatever you--"

"Can you be... less nice to me? Can you just be less perfect? Please?"

Ice floods Tony’s veins, freezing his still blood.

“It's just that I’m really tired,” Peter whispers, like he's telling Tony a secret. “Normally I can deal, but I'm just so... so tired, and you're... if you could just be a little less... you. I think that would help?” he takes a gulping, awful breath. “I think it would be better.”

Tony feels torn open. “I.”

“I know you don’t mean to," Peter goes on, earnest. "I know you don't mean to make it harder, but sometimes it feels like you can tell? And I’m obviously stupid in love with you, and. It would help, I think.”

“Peter.”

“Please? Just for the moment. Just... for a little bit.”

Tony stares at him, holding himself as still and together as he dares. He's not--happy, he's heartbroken, it's sad and awful that he's hurting the kid, he hates that part. But God. Why is his heart suddenly pounding, why can he feel his pulse in his wrists and neck?

"Peter."

"Sometimes I feel like I'm never gonna make it, and you keep being... so amazing, and I. And so. Please?"

Tony can't breathe. It's terrible that Peter is suffering, but God--

Oh God. Why does he feel as though someone lit up a brick of C-4 and a shoved it in his chest?

"You love me?"

Peter blinks at him. "Um. Duh."


	4. Lime

_You love me?_

_Um. Duh._

Tony watches Peter sleep like some sort of perverted guardian and replays those two slurred syllables in his mind mechanically, desperately, a man in crisis.

_I’m obviously stupid in love with you._

_Can you be... less nice to me?_

“ _I’ll do my best_ ,” he’d said, like an idiot. But it had made Peter smile, grateful and tired and out of it, _high_. In all the years they’ve known each other, Peter has never directly hinted at his own feelings, and it was never openly acknowledged between them. And now Peter has a boyfriend. He wouldn’t have wanted Tony to hear that in his usual state of mind, of that much Tony is certain.

He’s not certain of much else, though.

_... stupid in love..._

His left wrist cramps up on him and he clutches it in his right hand, squeezing, rotating the joint to relieve the tension.

*

Steve is the one to suggest working from Peter’s bedroom.

Tony is pleasantly surprised, and then appreciative, because nothing in heaven or on Earth was going to get him to budge from Peter’s bedside and now they never have to find out how many heads he’d have bitten off that tried. It doesn’t take Tony very long to figure out that Steve feels guilty, too.

They have that in common.

“Drills are good, but I want to throw Wanda at them as soon as possible.”

“Agreed.”

They are sitting at the foot of Peter’s king-sized bed. Tony bought them both the latest in ergonomic pillows for maximum gluteal and lumbar support. They have a holo board for Tony to draw and collate their data on and Steve brought an actual paper notebook he likes to use that Tony can screen-capture and turn into digital data later. It’s worked for their renewed tentative co-captaincy so far.

It’s still a few fancy gadgets away from them rolling around on the floor.

“Vision, too.”

“Yes.” Tony makes a note of the formations Fury sent them for training. Developing shielding tech for non-powered humans is kind of his thing now, and trying them out _en masse_ against someone the likes of Wanda and Vision is the perfect way to assess how they work. “Not Thor, though.”

Steve chuckles. “Definitely not yet. But Sam said he’d help.”

Peter stirs on the bed.

They both freeze, looking up at him.

“Peter?” Steve says, voice careful.

Tony waits, every muscle in his body locked tight. Peter has been sleeping on and off since their conversation and the only time Tony left his side was for a ten-minute shower break. Still, he hasn’t been talking, and hasn’t been fully conscious since yesterday. Dr Strange said it was normal, and has been checking in on him periodically by opening a terrifying circular portal that spits magical sparks onto Tony’s furniture and lets the doc walk into the compound like he owns it.

“Mr Stark?” Peter mumbles, and there’s a shuffle and he’s trying to get up—

Tony and Steve both rush over to him, helping prop him up, talking over each other to get him to lean back, take it easy, take it slow, it’s okay.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” Peter says, laughing breathily. His voice is still raw but he looks less pale today. “Guys, seriously.”

“We should call the doctor,” Steve says.

“FRIDAY, get Strange in here,” Tony tells her.

“ _On it_ ,” replies FRIDAY. “ _Should I notify the others_?”

“Yes, they’ll want to know—“ Steve starts to say.

“Wait.” Tony looks at Peter steadily. “You up for a stampede of worried coworkers? ‘Cause we’ve been keeping them out of your room by sheer force.”

Peter looks back at him, and blinks thoughtfully. His pajama shirt has pac-man on it. “Y-yeah. I think so, yeah.”

“You think so or you’re sure?” Tony rubs the hand he has on Peter’s back up and down a couple of times, feeling the bumps of his spine against his palm. It’s a businesslike touch, just to get him to tell the truth. Just. “It’s okay to say ‘not yet’, Pete.”

“...Okay. Um, then maybe. Maybe not yet.”

Tony nods, and Steve smiles encouragingly at Peter. “That’s fine. FRIDAY, hold off.”

“ _Got it.”_

“How are you feeling?” Tony asks him.

Peter looks up at Steve, then back up at him. He smiles guiltily. “... Hungry.”

Steve and Tony exchange a look that is mostly relief. “Good. Good. That’s probably a good sign.”

A swishing, fizzing sound starts up behind Tony, like a fuse lighting on fire.

“You summoned me?”

An opening in the space-time continuum by Peter’s desk lets in Strange and Thor, who must have been with him when FRIDAY called and relayed Tony’s message. Tony shoots Peter a look but Peter seems pleased to see Thor.

“Peter’s awake,” Steve says. “He says he’s hungry.”

Dr Strange strides up to Peter’s bed and casually dislodges Tony’s grip on Peter’s upper body, then stares Steve down until Steve, too, lets go. Peter stays sitting up, watching the scene with a faintly expectant look.

While Strange does his exam, Tony and Steve catch Thor up on Peter’s condition. Thor's concern initially manifested as snowfalls in Texas and hailstorms in Australia, but things seem to have calmed down since.

“He is strong, our young Parker.” Thor nods, crossing his arms over his chest. “Yes, I knew he would fully recover. He is iron-willed.”

“Sure you did, buddy,” Tony mutters, patting him on his massive bicep.

“Listen, I’m going to go tell Sam, okay? I’ll ask him to hold off visiting Peter, I promise, but he’s been out of his mind about this. He lost someone in a similar play as what happened to Peter in Buenos Aires,” Steve says to Tony, apparently deferring the decision to him.

“Yeah okay, go ahead. Thor, you wanna tell the others? We have a captive audience waiting for updates; just tell them not to crowd in here all at once.”

“Of course.” Thor shoots Peter one last look and then leaves. Steve promises Peter he’ll come back soon and takes off after him.

Strange is making Peter take deep breaths and is holding his hand in front of his chest; a glowing circle with runes is lighting up the air between them.

“Good,” he mutters. “Very well. I am... fairly surprised, I have to admit. You’ve recovered very quickly. Even the drugs seem to be out of your system already.”

Peter grins, pleased with this information. “I have a pretty badass metabolism.”

Strange huffs a little laugh, which Tony suspects is rare of the tight-ass he’s barely spoken to these past couple of days. “That you do.” He stands up and the glowing circle vanishes. He turns to Tony. “I can follow-up on his progress in a few days, but there’s nothing else for me to do here.”

He starts to open up the portal again, swishing his hand in the air and turning his arm clockwise to create an opening into what appears to be an old wooden house, or even a museum.

“What can we do for him, then?” Tony asks.

Strange steps into his sanctum, turning to speak even as the portal begins to close.

“Feed him,” he says, with an implied ‘obviously’ right before he’s out of sight.

Tony stares after him for a beat. “...Douchebag.”

“I kinda like him.”

Tony snorts. He looks at Peter over his shoulder. “You like everybody.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yeah, you do.”

“I really don’t—“

“Name one person you don’t like.”

Peter gives him a defiant look. “There was this kid in my class called Flash who called me names.”

The magnitude of fury that such a simple accusation arouses in Tony actually makes him distantly fear for his own sanity. “Oh, yeah? Want me to drop him off of someplace high? The top of the Eiffel Tower? The stratosphere?”

Peter’s amusement dims, and Tony suddenly gets the sense that he said something wrong.

“Peter—“

“It’s... stuff like that.”

Tony’s breath stutters. His wrist aches. He’d figured maybe Peter wouldn’t remember, since he’d been high. Apparently he does.

“I. Peter, what did I—“

“I wasn’t gonna. I’m sorry I brought it up.” Peter looks mortified, and he may not be the strongest Avenger but he is the bravest. He’s looking down at his blanketed lap as he goes on. “I figured you knew, obviously, but. Anyway, I. I didn’t mean to imply that you made it... difficult. Obviously it’s on me, if I can’t.” He swallows, chest heaving. “But Matt’s awesome. We started hanging out after the New Delhi mission, when you were working on all that Stark Industries PR stuff and, and I was hanging out in the lab a lot ‘cause it was the end of senior year.”

“Matt seems... nice. I’m happy for you.”

There’s a moment of silence for the least sincere thing Tony has ever said.

Then:

“I’m so sorry, Mr Stark,” Peter whispers. He looks up and meets Tony’s eyes. His own are filmy with tears. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t; I was totally out of it. Please forgive—“

“No. Peter.” Tony stumbles towards him and kneels onto the floor, inadvertently in a prayer position with his elbows on the mattress. “No. Come on, no. There’s nothing to forgive.”

“But I made it all awkward, and it’s probably the last thing you need right now...”

“Peter.” He reaches out to curl his fingers around Peter’s closest wrist. “Hey. Listen to me. What I need is for you to focus on feeling better. What I need is for you not to feel guilty over things you have no control over. Things that are...” he grips Peter a bit harder. “Things that are amazing, and that... Jesus, anyone would be lucky to be thought of that way by you, kid.”

Peter laughs wetly, disbelieving. “Yeah, m’sure Tony Stark feels really lucky about being thought of by me.”

“I.” Tony Stark’s feelings on the matter are buried so far down deep in a trench as to be irrelevant. “Peter, I care about you very—“

Peter brings his hands up to his face and covers it, thoughtlessly causing Tony’s hold to break and startling Tony with how negligible his own muscle strength is compared to Peter’s. He definitely has his super-strength back.

“Okay.” Peter nods, groaning muffled in his hands. “Okay, I think I could use a minute. I need to call May.”

He hears it loud and clear: _go away_.

Tony finds himself standing back up. He nods, even though Peter won’t be able to see him. “We kept the injury from her, against all our better judgments but as per your instructions.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

He drags his feet out of the room, only now digesting the fact that he has kept a practically uninterrupted vigil, and not given Peter any space at all. He stands out in the corridor and looks both ways; at the far-end steps that lead to the second floor bedrooms where he keeps his well-stocked bar, then at the living room and kitchen area where he can hear distant voices of his teammates.

The desire to black out rises in him like tar.

He clenches his hand into a fist and starts walking.

“Tony! Did Strange have anything else to say about Peter?”

“I spoke to Helen again; she’s speaking at a medical conference in Seattle next week and promised she’d arrange a layover with New York so she can check on him, too.”

“What did Peter say? Is he finally letting us contact his aunt?”

Tony answers as many questions at a time as he can, and lets Rhodey pat him on the back and Bruce push a bowl of blueberries his way, and silently makes himself a promise.

*

He pays a Belgian sous-chef a fairly ridiculous figure to stay at the compound the next few days and cook Peter things specifically for medical recuperation, tailoring the menu to Peter’s tastes.

Sam loudly teases and complains about the fact that they don’t each have their own personal sous-chef after every injury, and then takes Tony aside and gravely thanks him for his thoughtfulness. He even admits to Tony that he had a flashback after Peter was hit, and that was why Wanda got to him first and not Sam himself. Of all the things him and Tony have in common, including bad relationships with their fathers, PTSD is the one that tends to really bring them together.

*

“Eyes up. Come on, eyes up, Stark!”

“It’s funnier when you say it,” Tony grunts at Natasha, who is wearing an insulting zero items of padding to fight both him and Happy in the boxing ring. “Happy just sounds like he’s worried I’m checking him out.”

“Oy! That footwork you just pulled was bullshit!” Happy calls.

“Stop being funny,” Tony tells him.

“Stop being a pussy,” Happy shoots back.

“Stop using the word ‘pussy’ that way,” Natasha quips, seconds before she sweeps Happy’s legs from under him and punches the side of Tony’s face so hard the hit reverberates throughout his head gear and makes his ears ring.

“Christ, Nat,” he wheezes, finding himself flung against the ropes. “I thought you were taking it easy on us.”

“I am.” She frowns in confusion. “Can’t you tell?” She didn’t even put her hair up, the way she usually does for practicality when she’s fighting a minimally worthy opponent. It kind of hurts Tony’s feelings.

“All right, I’m calling it,” Happy groans. He stands up and eyes Natasha gingerly, like he’s afraid she’s going to flatten him again. “We’re done here.”

“I pay the bills around these parts,” Tony pants. “I get to call it.” He gives Natasha a weary look. “And yeah, consider it called.”

Still panting, he takes off his helmet and pads and then bites off his gloves, shucking them around the post of the ring. His private cellphone is on the floor near the area.

“I’m gonna join Steve and Sam, you coming?” Nat says behind him.

Tony eyes the weightlifting area, now back to its former glory after that training session where Peter fought Steve. Sam is doing deadlifts but Steve is pacing, seemingly deep in thought.

“Not right now, Nat.”

He bends down to pick up his phone and is struck by an idea.

“ _Tony_?”

“Hey, Pep.”

“ _Hey. I have a board meeting in five, can this wait?”_

“I’ll be quick. I need a favor.”

“... _What is it_?”

He clears his throat. He can feel trails of sweat running down his hairline, and soaking through his shift in his lower back. “Give your assistant the day off. Matt something. Tell him not to come in to work tomorrow.”

Pepper scoffs on the other end of the line. “ _Ehm, okay. And can I know why I’m doing this_?”

“He’s going to want to visit the compound. That’ll give him a nice window.”

“ _If you need to talk to him, you’ll see him Friday when you come to New York_ —“

“Not to see me.”

There’s a pause. “ _I see_.” She sighs. “ _He said he forgot to ask you something about the specs you wanted for the quarterly and went back in, had us waiting in the helicopter for almost ten minutes. Is it Peter?”_

“...Yeah. It’s a bit of a thing.”

“ _I see_ ,” she says again. “ _Okay. Consider it done_.” After another small pause, she adds: “ _You’re very nice sometimes, you know that?”_

“I’m really not, but you sure are. And thank you. See you Friday, Pep.”

“ _See you Friday, Tony_.”

Steve is walking towards him. When him and Natasha cross paths they give each other a low-five without even looking at each other.

“Tony. You walking back to the quarters?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll walk with you.”

Tony shrugs and motions for Steve to do just that, and they step out of the gym enclosure.

“Any plans tonight? Bucky and I were going to eat dinner down in the main cafeteria soon; you’re welcome to join us.”

“I’ll eat upstairs. I have patrol, and then I’m writing Maria Hill a long ‘thank you’ letter.” Steve looks confused. “You don’t wanna know.”

“Okay. Aren’t you gonna go check on Peter?”

Tony shrugs. “Nah, he’s all set. His aunt is with him; she got in late yesterday.”

“You sent a plane to get her after he told her?”

Tony nods.

“That’s really nice, Tony. But I’m sure he wouldn’t mind it if you—“

“It’s okay, Steve.” He tries to give Steve a look that will end this conversation. They pass a group of SHIELD personnel in office apparel, all of whom ignore them with impressive aplomb. “He’s good.”

Steve sighs. “Listen. Rhodey and I had a little talk—“

“And he already told me all about it. No need to go over it again.”

“No, I just.” Steve quiets as they pass a guard by the weapons storage locker, giving him a respectful nod that the man returns. “I was made to realize that I screwed up. I thought I told you at the time, that I never meant to imply it was on you.” His voice drops to a lower volume. “But I was only thinking about Peter, and I didn’t think about how you’d take the comment. Obviously things are different now, and he has this guy he’s been seeing. I was wrong.”

Tony fights the urge to walk faster; he’s hardly going to outpace Captain America. “Thanks. It’s fine.”

“I just mean that he’s obviously over it. I misinterpreted things.”

“Okay, yes.” He pats Steve’s shoulder; it’s like touching solid marble. “Seriously, don’t worry about it.”

*

He has dinner with Rhodey in the kitchen. Rhodey offers him wine to go with the steak, but Tony declines.

He doesn’t sleep very soundly, but his conscience is lighter for it.

*

“ _Tony. There’s someone at the main entrance you wanted to be notified about_.”

Tony starts guiltily, because there’s pretty much only one person FRIDAY would single out to him today and it's sheer luck that FRIDAY caught him alone in his bedroom instead of in a room full of other Avengers to tell him this. He puts his stylet down and dons his red-tinted sunglasses. It’s already noon; he’d thought Matt would have come in earlier.

“Is he getting through?”

He grabs a black blazer and throws it over his tee and chinos.

“ _Yes. His security clearance checked out. He is being escorted by Agent Sampson_.”

Tony exits his bedroom and starts walking towards the living room area Agent Sampson is going to pass through to get to Peter. He’ll finally be able to have a moment with Matt alone to get a better sense of the guy, and he’ll even get to see Matt and Peter interact when he escorts Matt into Peter’s room—

Which is why he thinks better of it.

“FRIDAY?”

“ _Yes, sir_?”

“Have Sampson take him directly to Peter’s room. If the Agent is chicken to enter the Avengers quarters, tell him the cleaning staff does it once a week and no one’s been struck by lightning yet. I’m lifting the agents’ ban from that area for him, today.”

“ _Very well_.”

He gets on the elevator instead, and takes it down to the ground floor to walk over to the lab building. Bruce is hanging out there today; he’ll join him.

*

They are halfway through a consult call with Shuri when Tony realizes he left his encrypted tablet with the latest protective SHIELD gear designs in his bedroom.

“ _Can’t you access it remotely_?” Shuri asks; her holo’s quality as crisp as if she were standing right there in front of him. It is laughably better than Ross’.

“It’s offline. It’s too well-secured, I wanted it completely off the grid—like I was writing on a notepad, on real paper.”

Shuri smirks. “ _That is a very cute idea. Quaint_.”

“We’ll wait for you,” Bruce says, making an encouraging motion.

Tony gets up and starts walking back to the main building.

It’s barely been an hour since Matt arrived, and if Tony were—if given the chance, Tony is sure anyone would prolong a stay at Peter’s bedside as long as possible. The odds of him running into the guy are low.

It is seconds after he’s had this thought, of course, that he sees Yolanda the security guard open the main door and a blond head emerge into the sunlit concrete.

“Hey. Matt.”

The guy turns to look at him with a startled, guilty set to his shoulders. He’s wearing a nice forest-green shirt and pants that actually fit him, instead of the shapeless jeans Peter usually favors; he might be a good influence.

Tony raises his hands to show he comes in peace. “I’m not busting your balls, man, just wanted to chat for a second.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure Mr Stark.” Matt’s eyes meet Tony’s head on. “Is. About Stark Industries, or Miss Potts? Or is this about Peter?”

“This is definitely not about Stark Industries or Miss Potts. You’re not on duty.” Tony gives him a curt smile. “Relax, man. Peter must have told you we’re friends.” Friends. What a strange word to describe what they are. “We all look out for him around here.”

Understanding dawns in Matt’s features. “So this is the ‘if you hurt him I’ll have you fired’ talk.” He smirks.

Tony hates the whole ‘millennials are too confident’ stereotype, but something about this kid’s self-possession irks him.

“No, no, come on. I’m not quite as _gauche_ as all that.” He pats Matt on the arm. It’s possible his smile has at this point lost any pretense for sincerity. “This is the ‘if you hurt him I’ll have you killed by one of my drones’ talk.”

Matt hesitates a moment, then laughs.

Tony laughs too.

“Um. Okay, well. If that’s all—“

“It is." He steps towards the compound's entrance. "Are you leaving so soon? Didn’t Peter tell you he has a personal chef for the week?”

“His Aunt’s still up there.”

“Oh. So?”

Matt squints against the sun, shrugging.

“I have a bunch of work to do. Can’t just hang out in his room all day, you know?” To his credit, he immediately senses that that was the wrong thing to say. “I mean, I wish I could. But he’s still sleeping a lot and I hadn’t really met his Aunt before, so it’s pretty awkward in there.” He smiles sheepishly.

Tony watches him walk to the lot building, where his self-driving Stark car is undoubtedly parked.

He had sincerely hoped Matt would make it harder to dislike him.

*

Peter is well enough to leave his room and walk around the house the next day. May Parker flies back to Queens at his behest with promises about frequent check-ins, but only after Tony and Steve swear to her that they will never respect Peter’s wishes again, and instead will call her the second he’s been injured.

“He had a broken arm for three days once and only told me after the bone had started to set with his crazy-healing powers.” She gives the Avenger co-captains a desperate, pleading look right before getting on Tony’s plane. “You want to enable that attitude? He’s a martyr at heart and he needs to be stopped.”

Tony agrees with her, both silently and then verbally, and that’s why she leaves. She trusts him, and she trusts how much he cares about Peter—it’s been that way since she discovered Peter’s secret identity and realized Tony had been trying to keep him out of trouble, instead of pressuring him by piling fake ‘Stark internship’ work on him.

Peter’s presence around the quarters again is a morale boost for everyone on the team and thus everyone in SHIELD the team interacts with. The one thing that seems to piss him off is that he’s not back on the patrol roster, which he argues with Steve about mercilessly.

A week ago, Tony might have arranged a distraction, such as for his friends to fly in and see him, or conversely for Peter to fly to see them one college at a time, but Peter’s slurred words still ring in his ears.

_Can you be... less nice to me?_

*

“Hey Stark, can you take my patrol shift tomorrow?” Bucky asks, tossing a ladle into the kitchen sink.

Tony shrugs. “Depends on the time. I’m flying to New York for a meeting, but if you need—“

“Oh no, it’s fine. I’ll ask Thor.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Tony sees Peter look up from his salad. He’s been acting pretty much like himself despite what happened the last time they were alone in a room together, but the one notable difference is that... they haven’t been alone in a room together since. Tony credits himself with that achievement.

It’s just him, Bucky, Wanda and Peter eating lunch because the rest of the team is training in the gym. Peter is banned from additional workouts, Bucky has been dealing with a chronic pain flare up, and Wanda has really bad period cramps and tapped out.

“You’re going to New York?” Peter asks.

“Yeah.” Tony drops the bowl he was holding into the sink and turns to address him directly, leaning his ass against the counter. “You want a ride? I’m sure your aunt would love a little surprise visit just three days after you kicked her out of the compound.”

“She was missing work to basically watch me sleep,” Peter mutters distantly, gaze far away. He chews on his lower lip for a few more thoughtful moments. “And you’re going to Stark Industries HQ?”

“Yup.”

He nods. “Okay. I might tag along so I can visit Matt, actually.”

“Peter, that sounds so nice,” Wanda says. “You are a very good boyfriend.”

“Thanks, Wanda.” He smiles. “And thank you, Mr Stark.”

“...You got it.”

“How is it going with you two?” Wanda adds. Her long hair is up in a messy bun, and a red tendril escapes the hold as she leans across the kitchen counter towards Peter. “He knows your identity, obviously... has that been challenging?”

“It’s... fine. I mean we’ve only been dating a couple of months. Three months, I guess, soon.” Peter spears some more food in his fork. “But, uh, yeah. It’s good. It’s not serious or anything, but... he’s nice.”

“Good. I’m happy for you. I know dating in this life can be hard, especially if you want to start anything 'not serious'.”

"Yeah. Though you don't have that problem anymore."

She chuckles.

Tony sort of nods along and puts a few more dishes away in the sink.

He doesn’t seek out Peter the rest of the day, or at all until the time comes the following morning for them to fly to New York, and even then all he sends is a text from his personal line so that Peter will know to meet him in the hangar on the roof.

Peter replies: _omw_

And then: _is happy coming?_

So Tony gets a grumpy, disgruntled Happy to join them last minute so that Peter won’t feel awkward alone with him on the plane. Happy only agrees on the condition that he doesn’t have to fly back with them and can get a three-day weekend in the city to spend with his sister and her family, but Tony is happy to oblige him.

Once the three of them are seated inside he puts on his headphones and avoids Peter as much as he reasonably can in the space they are afforded.

*

“Great. And... I think this is the last one. Is it?” Pepper looks at Matt. “It is? Good. Here you go, Tony.”

He signs one last piece of paper and then they are done.

People start shuffling around and standing up from their chairs; there are easily a dozen Stark Industries employees at this thing right now, all of whom seem to have a sort of hero-worship thing going on for Pepper which Tony doesn’t blame them for one bit. He still got his fair share of (arguably unearned) praise and admiration, and a seat at the head of the very long, very shiny mahogany conference table.

“Thanks, everyone,” Pepper calls.

Tony glances at Matt, who is tucking his laptop away.

Peter has been waiting outside for him to finish up and Pepper offered to give the guy a break half an hour ago, but Matt refused. He seemed not to realize that Peter’s hearing meant he’d know about the exchange. Meanwhile, Tony has been stealing looks over his shoulder at Peter and been forced to watch him grow increasingly despondent as time went by.

“Tony, thank you again for making the trip. I think this was productive, and I’m sure the board will be really pleased with the paparazzi pictures that’ll be in papers tomorrow.” Pepper smirks at him. “Tony Stark, stepping foot in his own office building; very scandalous.”

Tony rolls his eyes at her, but he’s half-smirking too.

Matt finally walks outside the office along with most everyone else, and Tony watches Peter stand up from the bench and greet him with a nod. No kiss; not even a hug. The air must be chilled out there.

“Hey, how’s that situation going?” Pepper whispers.

“Miss Potts, the phone call with Apple is in five,” one of the last occupants calls before stepping out.

“Thanks, Dylan.” She turns back to him. “So? How is it?”

“I’m... not sure. They just started dating, and they kept it a secret most of the time.”

“Okay. Well, that was a really boring answer and now I’m going to have to be bored during my phone call with Apple.” She sighs, mock-dramatically. “Thanks for that.”

Tony chuckles. “Wanna hear about Wanda and Vision? That’s the weirdest thing we all let happen without comment recently—“

“Didn’t you just hear Dylan?” She’s already walking out. “Phone call. Apple. Five minutes.”

“I’ll see you next week?”

“Exactly!”

And she’s off. Tony watches through the glass doors as Matt tries to follow her but she makes some insisting gestures and almost physically pushes him towards Peter, then walks away flanked by a small group of four of her people.

Peter glances into the office at him and seems to hesitate, but Tony silently motions for him to go on and sits back down at the head of the conference table, pulling up his laptop. That way, his back is to them. Peter will have understood that he’s happy to wait and he owes the kid this much, at the very least.

“—do you still call him ‘Mr Stark’, anyway? _I_ call him that, and he doesn’t even know my name. You’re his teammate. His fellow Avenger.”

Naturally, and to Tony’s horror, he immediately realizes that now that the hubbub has died down he can hear every word Matt and Peter are saying. Pepper must have left the doors ever so minutely ajar.

“It’s just a habit.”

“Is it? Or is it just your daddy kink? ‘Cause only one of those is visible from space—“

“God, shut up, Matt.”

“What?”

“You always bring him up and you always bring _that_ up and I’m... just... just stop it.”

A low laugh. “If you think I didn’t notice that you got with the highest-ranking guy at Stark Industries who wasn’t Tony Stark, you’re even more naive than I thought, little Parker.”

Peter doesn’t say anything for a moment. Tony breaks out of his congealed state and grabs his bag to start searching for his headphones. He shouldn’t be hearing any of this, Jesus Christ.

“You think you’re the highest-ranking guy at Stark Industries who isn’t Tony Stark?” Peter snorts, and he sounds like he’s sincerely trying to get the joke. “You’re kidding, right? Dan Patel is the CIO, and Zev Horowitz is the Senior Data Analyst. You stand near the most powerful person here, but Pepper holds the position, not you. And none of those people would even think about comparing themselves to Tony Stark.”

A beat. “Yes, God forbid I imply I’m the same species as your precious Tony Stark.”

“You’re not.” Peter’s voice comes out choked. “You wish you were, but you’re nothing like him. You’re not funny, you’re overconfident, and when you’re a dick you do it on purpose; there’s no heart behind it.”

“Jesus fuck, little Parker—“

“And cut that out, I told you I hate that,” Peter snaps. And then: “...This was a mistake. This whole thing.”

“No shit.”

There’s another, longer pause.

“Matt... I’m sorry. I was the one who pushed you into... trying to turn this into something it wasn’t.”

“You’re never going to be with him, you get that, right?” Matt sounds like he is genuinely sorry for him. “Like... I’m sorry I’m not a world-saving tech-genius billionaire superhero with a heart of gold, but there’s only one of those in the known universe. And he’s never going to love you the way you want him to.”

Tony finally finds his headphones. Not that there’s a point in putting them on; there’s nothing else to be heard or blocked out, and moments later he hears the swing of the conference room doors opening.

“Hey, Mr Stark? Can we go home?”

*

“So... how was it?”

Peter looks up from the personalized holo-tablet Tony gave him last Christmas. “How was what?” but the look in his eye says he already knows. He’s sitting one row away and across from Tony, and even with that and his face shadowed by the dimmed setting on the cabin's overhead lights Tony can see his pretty eyes clearly.

“Seeing Matt. That whole... situation in general.”

“We broke up.”

It’s as abrupt as it had seemed back when Tony inadvertently overheard the whole thing. He’s surprised Peter told him so soon, however.

“Peter. I’m... I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay. Matt was... not that nice, in the end.” Peter smiles ruefully.

“Well. You deserve someone who is nice to you.”

Peter’s smile fades. He looks at Tony with an inscrutable expression, which is unnerving in and of itself since Tony usually prides himself on reading Peter’s expressive features like an open book.

“Yeah?” Peter says faintly.

“Of course, kid.” Tony shuffles in his seat, uncrossing his legs to lean forward, elbows resting on his knees. His tie swings into the space, brushing his wrists. “There’s no question of that, okay?”

“You didn’t think he was nice,” Peter says, quiet. “Right? You didn’t like him.”

“I didn’t know him enough to dislike him.” That’s a lie. Just... flat-out. But Peter doesn’t need him to bring his own feelings into this. “But he’s obviously got a couple of screws loose if he just let you go like that.”

Peter shrugs. “We were barely dating. We went on three dates, total. Two were at his place in Williamsburg, and I’m only counting those because we ordered takeout before messing around like usual.”

A spear of hot lead lodges in Tony’s chest.

“Still.” He tries to talk past the obstruction. “I’m sorry.”

Peter draws his lower lip into his mouth, making Tony have to look to the side a moment, stare at the empty seats there.

“My Aunt didn’t even know I had a boyfriend. I told her we had a casual hookup thing going on, but I didn’t update her on it when it seemed like it might become a thing.” He sighs. “Guess that was a sign.”

“To be fair to past-you... you also didn’t tell her that you were a crime-fighting superhero for years.”

Peter snorts, tiredly slumping in his seat. “I guess you got me there.”

In his current slouching position, his back is horribly arched.

“You know those seats are adjustable, right?” Tony tells him.

Peter sighs again. “S’okay. I’m okay.” He blinks at nothing, then looks back up at Tony. Because of the low lighting immediately after takeoff, Tony can see the shadows cast by his eyelashes. “So did you hear the whole thing, or just parts of it?”

Jesus.

“...I heard most of it.” Tony blanches. “Peter, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Nothing you didn’t know.” Peter draws the sleeves of his hoodie down to cover his hands, so that only the fingers poke out. Maybe he’s cold. Tony should adjust the environmental controls, only he can’t look away, or move. “I’m sorry you had to hear it.”

“You don’t get to be sorry. Matt, on the other hand... him I can have fired. Or would you prefer straight up murder?” But he remembers Peter’s previous reaction to this exact type of comment, and winces. “Sorry. I-I take that back.”

“No, it’s... it’s okay. Tell me.”

Tony stills.

He looks at Peter, at the soft glow of him, the angles of his face.

“...Tell you what.”

“What you’d do to him, if I wanted. Tell me what you’d do for me.”

Christ. The leaden spear in Tony’s chest slashes down, leaving a burning trail and opening up his spine, liquefying his belly.

“I.” He is gripping his own hands so strongly. “I’d do anything for you, Peter.”

“Almost anything,” Peter amends quietly, gaze heated.

Tony can’t answer that.

Physically, can’t. He momentarily lost the power of speech. Him. Tony Stark.

“You’re always nice to me, Mr Stark.”

“You asked me to be less nice to you, and I fucked it up. I failed even at being nice.”

“That’s okay. Sometimes I wish you were a lot less nice.”

“Peter—“

“Sometimes I wish you weren’t nice to me at all.”

Tony exhales what feels like fire.

“I don’t think you know what you’re wishing for, kid.”

“I do.” Peter’s legs shift a little, his thighs squeezing together. Tony’s gaze drops down on its own, just for a second, and Peter is wearing jeans and it’s dark, but it’s not that dark. “Thought about it enough times... I know exactly what I’m wishing for.” His voice is down to a soft murmur. “You know what you are to people, Mr Stark. And m’just a person.”

“There’s nothing ‘just’ about you.”

Peter presses his lips together and no sound escapes them, but he looks like one almost did.

Tony’s self-piloted plane is silent, so he doesn’t know where that loud roaring noise in his ears is coming from.

“He didn't tell you? That you were the best thing he'd ever seen?"

This time, a small whimper ekes out past Peter's vocal chords.

"You deserve someone who tells you that, Peter. You deserve the best things life has to offer. Forget nice; you deserve better than that."

"But I want."

 _You_.

Tony stands up abruptly, and runs a hand through his carefully rumpled hair.

Peter stands up, too; an echo. “Mr St—“

“Don’t. I.”

He can’t he can’t he can’t he _can’t_ —if he so much as _thinks_ it, he’s ruined.

Peter walks up to him, pink-cheeked, bright-eyed, his stupid clothes hanging off his frame and his toned muscles still managing to outline the fabric. He looks drunk—no, wait, that’s just how Tony feels, except that he isn’t, not even a little.

“Mr Stark I’m sorry,” Peter mumbles in a rush. “I can't help it, and you—you give me things and buy me things and you... the grand gestures and, and you offer to kill my boyfriend— “

“Ex-boyfriend,” Tony snaps, and immediately regrets it.

Peter’s eyes widen.

Outside, the sky looks like night.

“It’s... stuff like that,” Peter says weakly. He’s standing right in front of him. “I really wish you wouldn’t say stuff like that if you didn’t mean it. Makes it impossible to—what am I supposed to do?”

Tony’s hand grabs the front of Peter’s hoodie. He doesn’t tug him forward; the grip is to keep Peter away. He’s... he’s almost sure that’s why he’s holding on to the cloth in his hand. Peter is strong enough that he could easily overcome this barrier if he wanted to, but Peter is good, and he wouldn’t. He won’t.

“I’m sorry.”

“You keep saying that.” Peter’s eyes flicker between Tony’s.

“I’m so sorry, Peter.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“It’s not, you—“

“I can’t help myself and I should, I should—“

“You can’t help what, Tony?”

Tony freezes, and Peter does too. He’s still holding the front of Peter’s hoodie in his fist, but they both sort of stop, and Peter looks... fearful, or regretful, or—and he doesn’t know that he just eviscerated Tony by using one simple word, but somebody should tell him.

Tony cups the back of his head in one hand and draws him forward with his convenient placement of the other, and then does a terrible thing.

He kisses him.

Peter melts in his arms; he sags against him like a dead weight except that he‘s trembling and painfully responsive, lips parting to let Tony in, jaw coaxed open with the faintest push of Tony's thumb to allow his tongue into Peter's mouth. A full-body shudder wracks him head to toe when Tony lets go of his clothes and wraps his arm around Peter's waist, pulling him closer, pushing them together because he can't fucking stand the air between them.

"Tony..." Peter whispers, voice high and shaking. "Please..."

Tony's mind tries to pull back from the situation to think but he's never been more present, more _aware_ , everything raw like an exposed wire as he kisses and kisses and kisses Peter into next year, funneling his monstrous, cosmic desire for him into an embrace he feels in every cell in his body.

And Peter's pleading for more; that part is dizzyingly clear to him.

The more he kisses him the more it dawns on him how much, how goddamn much he wants to never stop. Peter shivers and shudders and rubs himself against Tony’s front, rumpling his pristine black suit. Tony’s hand falls from Peter’s lower back to cup his ass and Peter muffles a groan into his mouth, hips shoving forward into Tony’s crotch where Tony is hard.

Tony grunts, and falls backwards into his plush leather armchair; Peter falling with him, on top of him. Peter’s knees land splayed at his sides and the weight of him rests on Tony’s lap, a painfully welcome pressure. He grabs the back of Peter’s hair and twists it in his fingers, and the sound Peter makes in response is strangled and pained.

“G-god w-wait,” Peter pulls away, voice high and breathy. “Okay, okay w-wait—“

“S’okay,” Tony pants, unsure as to what Peter is asking for but sure that he’ll give it to him. He looks up at him and is dazed by what he sees; Peter is so goddamn amazing. “You okay?”

”I-I’m... I can’t...” He tucks his face into Tony’s neck and hyperventilates a little into Tony’s skin. “If you touch me, I’m gonna. Just. Wait.”

Tony realizes what Peter meant. ”You can,” he whispers immediately, rubbing patterns in Peter’s scalp with his fingers. “You can, Peter, it’s okay.”

Peter whimpers, nudging his hips into Tony’s again as he nudges his head into Tony’s touch. “Should s-stop.” But he rocks into him again.

”I will,” Tony murmurs. “I’ll stop right now.”

Peter shudders again. “I.” He rocks his hips down, the hard feel of his dick rubs against Tony’s lower abs. Tony feels a tug around his neck and knows Peter is holding onto his tie. “Ah. Meant me.”

Tony slides the hand that had been on Peter’s ass up his lower back under his hoodie, making Peter tremble on top of him, a powerful, intoxicating feeling.

”Tony...” Peter breathes. “Oh God, Tony...”

”Shh, it’s okay.”

“I...”

”You deserve to feel good. Come on.” He runs his palm up Peter’s warm, muscled back, marveling at how soft the skin is stretched over the knobs of his spine and the curve of his ribs. “Come on Peter.”

Peter tugs even harder at the tie, and his other hand flies up to grasp the back of the chair next to Tony’s head. He pulls away to look in Tony’s eyes.

Tony tips his head up and kisses him again, and when Peter falls apart on top of him he kisses him through it, messy and deep and frantic and perfect. Peter comes with the sweetest noises, the most desperate, plaintive sounds, while Tony breathes through his nose and tries to remember the cadence of every single one.

When he stops shaking, Peter sits back and drops the hand from the armchair to Tony's chest, resting it there as though soothing the heaving breaths the way one would try to calm down a racehorse, even though he’s still gasping shallowly himself. Tony certainly needs calming down.

Peter lets go of the tie as well, rolling his wrist to undo the way he’d looped it around.

“So...” he pants, quiet. “H-how am I gonna get over you now?”

Tony looks up at him.

He can’t say it, but God does he want to:

 _Please, please, please don’t_.


	5. Spring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My dear readers, it has been such a pleasure to share this delightfully self-indulgent story with you. This Chthulu of a chapter is more than 10K long, and I really really hope you like it.
> 
> Also, a friendly reminder about the ‘explicit sexual content’ tag. For. Reasons.
> 
> Enjoy <3

_“So... h-how am I gonna get over you now?”_

Tony’s hand is still partially in Peter’s hair. It feels as soft as he always imagined it would, and it’s awful to know, now, how many times he’s imagined it; not consciously, not directly, but in the back of his mind. It played in a loop.

“...Tony?” Peter whispers, a hesitant prompt.

Tony exhales in a rush. “I just.” He lowers his head a little, so that he’s not staring up adoringly at Peter’s face anymore. It’s less helpful than he’d hoped, and it doesn’t clear his thoughts. He doesn’t drop his hand from Peter’s hair yet. “FRIDAY, how many minutes left on this flight?”

“ _There are seven minutes left before landing_.”

Tony waits for a revelation or inner guidance as he deals with the satisfying weight of Peter in his lap and the enormity of his realization about how he feels about that positioning. No immediate answers arrive, nothing helpful beyond an instinctual want, and his body’s attempts to digest the knowledge that has been sitting within him all along. It’s obvious, all of it. Of course. Of course he wants to kiss Peter. He wants to do an awful number of things to him, including seeing him every day for the rest of his life.

“Okay. It’s... it’s okay, Mr Stark,” Peter says gently, like he’s understood something Tony hasn’t. He pats Tony’s chest with the palm that had been keeping his breaths in there. “It’s okay. You don’t have to... don’t worry.”

He starts to get up, and Tony almost stops him by trying to wrench him back down, as if he could move Peter if Peter didn’t want to be moved.

Peter stands, somewhat shakily, and puts his hands in the pockets of his hoodie.

“I won’t make a... scene.” He gulps. “I’m not actually a kid. I get it.”

“Peter.”

“Yeah.”

Tony looks up at him again, having starved himself of the sight enough. “What do you think you get?” he says.

Peter looks caught out by the question, but he has an answer. A devastating one. “I get that it’s impossible. That this can never—I get that maybe you felt sorry for me, that after three years of throwing myself at you one way or another I finally... got you to cave, or whatever this. Whatever this was.” He clears his throat. “But I get that it can never happen again, and I won’t make a fuss when it doesn’t. I’m not as naive as people think.”

“No.”

Tony stands up, muscles aching with the effort of restraint because he can’t lunge forward and try to make his and Peter’s mouths taste the same until Peter gets it. He can’t kiss Peter again; not ever again.

“No?” Peter echoes faintly.

“No, you’re not naive, and I do know that. And no, it can’t happen again, obviously.” That’s the part that hurts, but he gets it out. “But this wasn’t me feeling sorry for you. I’m not—I didn’t do this out of... you didn’t get me to cave.”

All those times he thought himself flattered and pitying, all those patronizing, shallow, pathetic attempts to deflect his thoughts away from the truth, when underneath it all lurked... this. His actions, too, though not malicious in intent, were deplorable. He kept Peter in the lab, and engaged him despite knowing how Peter felt, not to mention switching the location of the Industries meetings like some greedy bastard intent on hoarding Peter's affection all to himself.

“Peter, I’m sorry. I’ve been... the worst kind of friend to you lately.”

“You haven’t—“

“I did everything wrong. Everything.”

He reaches forward for a touch, just a touch to ground himself, or both of them. His hands cup Peter’s face, fingers sliding into Peter’s silky hair; thumbs caressing Peter’s cheekbones.

“I’m sorry.”

“I forgive you.”

“Don’t. Nothing I did just now, or for the past few weeks, came out of selflessness, you understand?” He sighs. “This... it can’t happen again, but I wish it could, and that’s wrong.”

Peter stares at him, and his eyes suddenly fill with tears.

“Peter—“

He shuts them, causing the tears to spill over and down his cheeks, wetting Tony's thumbs too.

“I. I never,” he whispers, and his voice breaks. “I never thought you’d. Never.”

“It’s not something I’m proud of, but you deserve to know. I don’t want you thinking... what just happened wasn’t on you, it was on me.”

“I think I’d rather not have known.” And, to Tony’s utter heartbreak, he manages a wet, shaky smile. “I think I wish you hadn’t told me. That you wanted this to happen again.”

“Peter, I—“

“It’s okay. It’s fine, it’s just gonna take me some time,” he interrupts, voice a croak. “That’s all. Just. Give me some time. I won’t bother you, I promise. And I’m sure you—we’ll be okay.”

He gently reaches up and grabs Tony's hands by the wrists, pulling them away from his face with ruthless force.

“It's okay. We’ll be okay, right?”

“Of course we will, kid.” They are still standing too close, but Tony can’t move yet. “This will pass for you. It might not feel that way now, but it will.”

Peter nods, and looks away from him. “Yeah.”

*

They land shortly after, and walk side by side into the elevator that will take them back to the Avengers quarters. They don’t speak another word to each other, and Tony can’t decipher anything about the distant look in Peter’s eye.

*

The Avengers travel a fair amount, for events other than wherever a mission takes them. Individually and as a group, they each have responsibilities, not to mention the team assignments that take place at the UN, or in Washington D.C., or Wakanda, among many others.

On this particular occasion, Fury calls the whole team in for a meeting in D.C. a handful of days after Tony found out what Peter's mouth tasted like. Tony and Steve gather everyone (Natasha was MIA, likely visiting Clint, and Thor was visiting his people’s colony, but they both return when called) and pile the in-house Avengers onto Tony’s plane, since the jet needs to be maintained for mission-specific travel.

This particular flight is quiet.

At first Tony is convinced it’s his fault—he put on his headphones and determinedly started working on his holotablet as soon as they prepped for take-off, not thinking about what he allowed to happen the last time he was here, not thinking about what he did. But then he looks up for a moment and realizes he’s done this before, and usually the others pick up what he’s putting down and don’t bother him, but tend to talk amongst themselves.

Not this time.

It's not him; it’s Peter. He tends to live in the center of conversation; he’s usually the focus of attention or at the very least an eager participant, whether he’s asking questions or answering them, engaging Bruce into teaching, managing to drawn lengthy discussions out of Natasha... even Bucky softens around him. But not this time.

He’s sitting with his own set of headphones (Tony gave him custom-made wide-range earbuds like his own once but Peter prefers the large sound-muffling kind) looking down at his phone, and he looks... not quite miserable, maybe, but certainly not excited or energized as usual. And the others can tell.

Peter muttered something about the break-up to Sam over dinner the morning after it had happened and Sam was very narrowly prevented from gearing up and flying to New York that very moment to kick Matt into next week, or at the very least scare the shit out of him as the Falcon. But his fury was assuaged by Peter, and he even ended up making Peter laugh by listing increasingly improbable threats to Matt’s corporeal safety.

Of course, now everyone thinks Peter’s mood of late must be because of that, and Peter himself certainly hasn’t contradicted the assumption. He remains quiet and withdrawn the whole time, engulfed in his blue hoodie.

The flight is really goddamn quiet.

*

In a turn of events Tony doesn’t think anyone could have predicted, Fury seems to genuinely like Peter, not just respect him. The man is hardly warm, but Peter hangs out on his good side—maybe he reminds Fury of someone, and it’s not like Tony doesn’t get it. Peter is really... really likeable.

“And what about Parker?” Fury looks at Steve. “When do we announce?”

“We announce whenever he tells us he’s ready,” Steve says firmly. “When he feels comfortable.”

They all look at Peter, Fury included.

Peter looks at Tony. His gaze is shuttered and professional. “How much time do I have left?”

“You have as much time as you want. Speculation is rampant, but contained, and so far pretty clueless. Your friends have kept quiet. So has—so have the two people at Stark Industries who know. So has Ken Chang, and I’ll thank Happy not to talk superhero business in high school children’s bathrooms anymore without checking all the stalls.” Peter’s eyes soften and he almost smiles at that. “It’s up to you, Peter.”

“Okay. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, Director. I promise. I’ll have an answer in... one more month.”

“No one would fault you if you wanted to take more time.” Fury looks at him steadily. Then he gives Peter a conspiratorial smile. “I just need to be able to tell our PR people that I’ve kept asking.”

Peter grins at him. “Thanks.”

The rest of the meeting goes well; Fury and Maria have Ross’s hologram join them midway, but it’s after a less than official check-in on everybody. Mainly, they need to address the updates on the vast (and seemingly growing) number of gifted people that are being discovered across the world. New York alone seems to have a superpowered hero every few blocks that SHIELD is keeping a close eye on, but on the international side things are starting to crop up, too. T’Challa (whose much sharper image quality continues to make Ross’ holo look like a high school science project, particularly now that they are side by side) provides updates on the African and European continents, with special emphasis on his monitor-non-interference rules. Shuri takes part in the call as well, to teach Tony and Bruce a couple of quick tricks for energy-signature tracking that will save them a lot of time down the road.

By the time it’s over, Tony and Steve have accumulated enough work that they need to sequester themselves for several hours and talk through potentially approaching new Avengers team members, and discuss pros and cons of each candidate. The list includes Dr Strange, who Tony has mixed feelings about but whose usefulness is undeniable. While they work, the others join Maria for a meet-and-greet with new SHIELD recruits, most of whom will move into the compound in just one week.

Tony is tired out when him and Steve call it a day and in a better mood for it, meaning the flight back to upstate New York is a bit more relaxed. He sits with Rhodey and Bruce and doesn’t think about how Peter tasted and makes an effort to talk to both of his friends this time.

A few of the others are playing Settlers of Catan, which Thor is convinced was inspired by an Asgardian board game. Peter isn’t among them.

“—haven’t even talked to ’Tasha properly. It’s been a _year_.”

“You keep hiding in the lab, Bruce,” Rhodey says. “Tony, are you listening? This applies to you both.”

But out of the corner of his eye, Tony notices Peter getting up from his seat.

He walks up to Tony with a resolute expression. His shirt has—oh God, he took off his hoodie and under it he’s wearing his ‘ _I survived my trip to NYC_ ’ shirt, the one Tony got him years ago, after he took Peter’s suit. He fits into it a bit better than he did at that time, he’s grown slightly taller and filled out his muscled arms and shoulders a bit more, but it’s still too large on him.

Given what happened on the return flight from Peter’s latest trip to the city, the shirt makes Tony want to sink into the floor.

“Mr Stark, can I ask you a—“

“Go ahead,” he blurts. Bruce, who is sitting across from him, throws him a funny look.

Peter has a knowing glint to his eye, but he doesn’t comment. “Well, I was wondering if we can stack my patrol shifts towards the beginning of the week so I can visit May next weekend. I’d fly to the city with you Friday and stay over in Queens–kind of like Happy did last time. If that’s okay.”

Tony gives him a tight smile, leaning forward in his chair. “You should walk over to the Cap and confirm about patrol, but that’s fine by me.”

Peter returns the smile, just as tightly. “You’re the best,” he says again.

“Flattery will get you everywhere.”

Peter stares at him for an incredulous beat and Tony struggles not to wince outwardly, holding his gaze as apologetically as he can.

Then Peter walks away.

Rhodey is staring at Tony, leaning his head against his hand. “You are such a fucking disaster.”

Tony isn’t even sure what he’s referring to, but he’s right.

“At least it doesn’t work on Peter anymore,” Bruce points out with a shrug. “So that’s good.”

*

The acoustics of the gym are good, the walls are sound-absorbent, but Tony still hears an echo every time he punches the bag, the sound creating a wave of satisfying reverberations. His arms ache, and he’s overheated, but he’s tiring himself out to win himself a night of sleep, and after gifting his teammates with the contents of his liquor cabinet this is his only option.

It feels good. He keeps it up for minutes, maybe hours, until his shoulders ache and so do his arms; his abs, his chest, his back, his legs.

He doesn’t hear Peter walk in, but he sees him.

It’s a very, very large gym, and it’s exclusively for Avenger-use since the security guards and SHIELD personnel have their own. Unless they plan a training session, they don’t run into each other often, and especially not late at night, which is what this is. Tony can’t be sure, but he thinks it’s after midnight. He had dinner a while ago.

Peter walks right up to him, and Tony turns to look. He expected this. He—he hadn’t hoped for it, but he’d expected it. Some sort of follow-up conversation, after what happened, after they admitted—after Tony admitted what he wanted, to himself and to Peter, with his words and his actions.

“Hey, Mr Stark.”

“Hey.”

His arms drop to his sides. His gloves seem to weigh three times what they used to five seconds ago. He feels slick with sweat, dripping with it; rank.

Peter doesn’t look at him like he’s anything other than what he wants. His eyes flicker over Tony and then do a second, more leisurely pass, red creeping up his neck. For once, he’s wearing a plain black shirt, and what look to be his old high school gym shorts. His ears are scarlet.

“Um. I’ve been thinking.”

“What is it?”

“Well, I know you were probably being... not totally serious, I guess, but I was thinking about Matt.”

Tony is taken aback.

He wasn’t expecting fucking that.

“And I was thinking that, with everything that happened, I wanted to make sure you didn’t actually fire him. Or tell Pepper anything that would—he really, really cares about his job. And he’s good at it, it sounds like. He was an asshole to me sometimes, but I wasn’t very nice to him either.” He draws his lower lip into his mouth for a moment. The way that small action makes Tony feel warrants a court-martial, probably. “It was kind of an unhealthy situation on both parts. Obviously I was dating him while I... while I was into someone else.”

Tony breathes out through his nose.

He hadn’t planned on having any specific conversation with Pepper, but he also hadn’t _not_ thought about dropping some sort of comment to her after a meeting. “Are you asking me? You’re asking me to let him keep working for me?”

Peter nods.

“Okay. Well. If it’s important to you, then I will hold off for now.” He cocks his head to the side. “But please let me know if you change your mind.”

“Yeah.” Peter smiles sadly. “Sure.”

“...Did he know?”

Peter doesn’t pretend not to understand what Tony’s talking about. “I never told him. And even after he’d guessed, I never confirmed it, but. Yeah. He could tell.” Peter looks up at the ceiling. “Turns out everyone could tell. Including you.”

“Peter—“

“No, it’s. It’s fine.” He looks back down and his eyes go to Tony’s body immediately, seemingly automatically. Tony feels the drip of his sweat acutely, so warm in the places where it gathers. His blood is still pumping intensely. His body doesn’t get it. “I think I’ve got it under control, now. Keeping it under wraps from the others.”

“Okay. Good.” And then, for some suicidal reason, he hears himself say: “And from me?”

Peter’s eyes come back up to his. He looks cornered, but too into the situation to be afraid. “No. Not from you.”

Tony needs to stop. It’s been four days. It happened on Friday; they flew to D.C. on Sunday, came back that same day, and today is Tuesday. It’s been four fucking days, how has he not made it a whole week—

Peter takes a step closer.

“I meant what I said,” he mutters.

_I get that it can never happen again, and I won’t make a fuss when it doesn’t._

But he also said: _Sometimes I wish you weren’t nice to me at all_.

A bolt of heat makes Tony suppress a shudder at the memory. He needs to stop.

“So did I.”

_It can’t happen again._

And: _But I wish it could_.

He’s still panting, and his hands in their gloves feel stifled, so he bites them off and tosses them aside, Peter watching the whole time.

Peter takes another step when the gloves have come off. He’s close enough that Tony can smell a waft of soap; his shampoo, maybe. He looks clean and fresh and young and amazing. He should leave before Tony does something terrible to him again.

“I really hadn’t considered you thinking of me that way,” Peter says, brutally sincere. “I knew you didn’t like Matt, but I never...”

“I hadn’t wanted to consider it,” Tony admits, pained. His voice comes out a rasp, deep from his gut. “But. Here we are, I suppose.”

“Yeah.”

Peter puts a hand on his sweaty chest, over Tony's heart. His own chest is heaving, fast and shallow breaths.

“You’re always good,” he says quietly. “Always good to me.” His hand slides up to Tony’s shoulder, drawing him closer, making him stumble forward.

“Peter—“

“It’s nothing. It’s nothing, I just—I was thinking about getting you off, because you didn’t even get off,” he says in a rush. Tony’s dick throbs at those words, a lewd agreement. “So if you’ll let me, then we’ll be even and I will stop thinking about it so much. Just this once.”

“Christ, Peter—“

Peter presses himself against Tony, hooking his arm around his neck, looking up at him with his flushed face, his pleading eyes, his smell—

“Please. Just once. I won’t bother you again, but if you'd just let me—“

“You don’t owe me any—“ But Peter cuts him off with a kiss, and he arches his whole body into Tony as he does it, unmistakably feeling the hard length of Tony nudging at him, and rubbing at Tony with his own.

Tony kisses him back, swallowing Peter’s whimpers, hips rolling back into the warm angles of him, just a little. He feels weak and indestructible. He grabs a globe of Peter’s ass through the flimsy pants and Peter moans, thrusting into him.

Tony breaks the kiss. “Peter—“

“I want to. So much, I want to.”

“Peter, please, this—“

“Just once, only now,” Peter whispers. “You want me to, right?”

Tony doesn’t answer for a moment, and Peter stills.

“You... you want me, right?” he echoes.

His voice is thready and vulnerable and how does he have no fucking idea what a depraved, starved fool he’s fallen for—

“Ah, fuck.”

He kisses Peter hard, and Peter makes a strangled noise into it, and Tony grabs his other asscheek with his free hand, and then Peter takes the hint a jumps on him, agile thighs wrapping around Tony’s waist. All of it without breaking the kiss.

Tony sinks slowly to the floor, where the mat is soft and yielding, and Peter pushes at his shoulders until he falls back and takes Peter with him, kissing furiously, mouthing at each other, tongues thrusting. Peter rocks against him like he did last time, but he has a better angle and thinner clothing between them now and it’s better, fuck, it’s somehow _better_ , and Tony encourages him by digging his fingers into Peter’s flesh, then remembering to slide his hands under the fabric to touch Peter’s skin.

Peter stutters in his rhythm as soon as he does it, finally breaking the kiss to pant open-mouthed, eyes closed.

“Peter...”

“That feels...” he shudders. “G-God, that feels so...”

Tony scratches lightly at him with his nails and Peter shuts his eyes even tighter, body locking.

“Good?” Tony murmurs.

“Too good. I... s-stop.”

Tony stops.

Peter rolls to the side and drops down next to him, tucking his face into the crook of Tony’s neck. His hand slides into Tony’s pants before Tony is able to process what the hell is going on, and then—fuck, then Peter’s fingers tighten around Tony’s dick and he can’t process anything else.

“Thought about it so many times...”

Tony initially mistakes Peter to mean he thought about performing the action after Tony didn’t let himself get off on the plane.

Then the way Peter meaningfully squeezes his grip when he says ‘it’ registers. And the timeline does, too, and it’s implied to go further back than what happened between them the first time.

“You thought about...?”

“Thought about... about what you’d look like,” Peter whispers, picking up a rhythm. Tony feels him rubbing against his hip as he does it, and also feels that his head is about to fly off. His body can’t contain the blaze, he’s just one person. “How you’d f-feel, in my hand... in my m-mouth...”

He entwines his leg with Tony’s, thrusting needily into Tony’s hipbone, breathing hotly into his neck.

“If you’d come inside me, if I asked...”

“Fuck,” Tony grunts, already on the edge. “Fuck, Peter.”

“Y-yeah, I... I thought about... this... oh, fuck, I...” Peter’s hand gets sloppy as he gets close, which is hotter, better. “Tony... I...”

Tony reaches up with the arm Peter hasn’t trapped against his side to grasp his hair. Peter hiccoughs at the grip, and his body seizes, and Tony feels wet heat spreading against his side.

“ _Fuck_.”

He comes into Peter’s slack grip at the same time as Peter sobs into his skin, riding out his orgasm against him, gasping, crying out “A-ah, y-yes, oh God y-yes...”

By the time they’ve both come down, Tony is ready to sink into deep, blissful sleep right there on the mats. He is physically exhausted and his mind is, briefly, wiped completely blank by the avalanche of pleasure that just overtook his system. And above all those things; Peter is there, resting his weight against Tony’s side, breathing into his skin.

“I... I didn’t fully believe you,” Peter whispers right into his ear. “When you said that stuff on the plane. Felt like a...” he makes a soft, embarrassed little noise that makes Tony’s spent dick twitch. “I’ve had that dream before. It felt unreal.”

Tony turns his head to the side to try to look in his eye, but Peter’s face is still mostly concealed.

“And now?” he says.

“Have better evidence now,” Peter mumbles.

Tony snorts, and then Peter does too, and then they are both sort of chuckling desperately.

“Okay. Okay. We have to...”

"Yeah." Peter disentangles himself before Tony has a chance to gently push him away, and he springs to his feet with insulting fluidity. He looks down at Tony with a thoughtful, almost curious expression, like he’s figuring him out, or just figured out something about him.

Tony’s first instinct is to make a sharp or lighthearted comment to wipe that look off of Peter’s face, regain the upper hand.

His second is not to say anything, because it’s Peter. He’s safe.

“See you tomorrow, Mr Stark.”

He walks out, leaving Tony to delete the footage of what just happened.

*

During breakfast the next day, Rhodey slides up next to Tony while he’s setting up his coffee.

“This whole ‘Peter’ situation ended pretty well, don’t you think?”

Tony doesn’t look away from what he’s doing. Peter isn’t in the kitchen, but he could come out of his room any second.

“Sucks that guy dumped him,” he comments neutrally.

“That guy was an asshole. Better he dump Peter and let Peter find someone better.”

_Someone better._

Rhodey nudges Tony with his elbow. “Hey. You keeping what we talked about in mind? It’s great Peter isn’t making moony eyes at you anymore; now I’mma need you to accept he’s a grown-ass man we throw into active combat all the time. Yeah?”

“Yup.”

“So no more parenting.”

“Jesus, Rhodey, no more parenting, I promise.”

*

Peter’s web latches onto the Iron Man’s left leg and he wrenches down, using Tony’s momentum against him to careen him sideways into the rock-climbing wall and smashing him into it.

Peter quickly webs him against the wall and, even as Tony’s arms scramble to ignite his laser-cutter before he’s immobilized, Peter taser-webs him and scrambles up FRIDAY’s systems for a good few seconds, scrambling Tony’s nervous system up while he’s at it.

"All _right_ , Peter!" someone shouts. It sounds like Sam.

He’s unsure how he ended up fighting Peter on this training session, but one moment Wanda and Thor were testing every last function of the Mark 37 and the next, Peter was disabling his thrusters and making him crash to the floor.

And now here they are.

Peter isn’t wearing his mask, but he might as well be. He’s focused, and occasionally winces with effort, but his expressions are hard to interpret.

Tony deflects the taser when the nanobots run the pneumatic subroutine and he finally lasers through Peter’s trap, rocketing away in the air and using his beams to shoot the space above Peter’s head. Peter dodges them easily and jumps twenty feet into the air, almost all the way to the top of the climbing ropes before grabbing onto one one-handed, and swinging himself up to the ceiling.

He turns to look around for Tony from there, and that’s when Tony first starts to get a feel for the look on his face: anger. Peter is frustrated, going on angry.

Tony chases after him and gets a web-shot propulsor for his troubles, then another web catches his breastplate and he’s swung around towards the wall again.

He stops the hit and turbos to the floor but something thumps into his back a moment later and then it’s Peter, and he’s shoving Tony against the wall and Tony’s suit lets him because Tony lets him.

Peter digs his arm into the suit’s neck, glaring fiercely at his mask.

“Are you even _trying_?” he rasps.

“Hey. It’s not my fault you’re a super-strong prodigy wearing the latest in nano-suit technology. Tell your benefactor I'm really impressed, whoever they are.”

Peter is not impressed. “You’re Iron Man. At least make me work for it.”

Tony feels a twitch of interest in a body-part that shouldn’t be involved in this discussion.

Then again, they are ten feet from where they were when—the other day.

“Thought I was.”

“Well, you were wrong.” Peter’s face is flushed from the workout, and his hair is matted in places and sticking out in others, an unknowing invitation. There are gunshots and explosions in the background, the occasional crackle of lightning, but Tony can’t look away. “And you’re not helping me by going easy on me.”

He grabs Peter’s free wrist in his hand and the nanobots flow in a circle around it, creating a handcuff.

Peter’s gaze snaps down, and he stares at his and Tony’s wrists, now locked together like a parole-officer and his prisoner. His eyes widen and his mouth drops open. Right. Tony keeps forgetting about Peter’s thing with the suit, and what happens when Tony’s wearing it.

“Guys! Guys! I’m calling it! The exercise is over.”

It’s Bruce. Peter lets him go, and Tony rolls his neck, feeling his cervical spine crack. Fuck, he’s strong.

“Good job, Peter,” Steve calls, giving him two thumbs up.

Peter waves vaguely in return with his free arm. “Thanks!”

The nanobots dissolve the cuff, and Peter steps away.

“You had me,” he says.

“Nah. You won that round.”

He walks away before Peter can reply, intent on getting to his room, and his shower.

*

The shower is good. It’s what he needed. He makes the water as cold as it will go, which is very, and he scrubs and rinses and vigorously soaps up again. He calms down. He breathes. He feels better.

Tony steps out of the bathroom and stops.

Peter is sitting on his bed.

“Well, hey.” At least he wrapped the towel around his waist—he’s walked into the bedroom naked more than once. “What’s. What are you doing here, Peter?”

Peter doesn’t answer right away; he just looks at him, legs crossed and back slightly hunched to lean his elbows on his spread knees, relaxed on top of Tony’s silk sheets, appearing quite distressingly at home. He’s still in the Iron Spider armor from the neck down.

This is the first time he’s been in Tony’s room. There simply wasn't a call for him to be before, even after he moved in. He wonders what Peter must think of the massive desk, the modern designer furniture Tony never uses, the gadgets and mechanical parts that are strewn pretty much all over the floor; the large window that leads to the balcony Tony lands on as Iron-Man more often than not. The custom-made ‘king-plus’ bed he’s sitting on.

“Wanted to talk to you.”

“O-kay. Can it wait for me to get dressed?”

“No.”

Tony’s eyebrows fly up. “No? What’s so urgent?”

Peter huffs. “During training. It felt like you weren’t even trying to fight me.”

Tony blinks at him. ‘Off-guard’ doesn’t begin to cover it.

“And I want to know if it’s because of...” he makes a hand motion, extending his arm in Tony’s direction. “What happened.”

"It...” he considers the question, really considers it. “It wasn’t. Today wasn’t any different than any other day.” He thinks back. “I didn’t make a conscious decision to soften my strikes.”

Peter gives him one of those pensive, speculative looks. Maybe he’s also remembering the time Tony came to his aid just a few weeks ago during their last group training session. “...Okay.” He frowns slightly. “You’re saying this has been... going on a while?”

“Me not wanting to accidentally murder you? Sure.”

“Right. That.” He nods. "Well, I'm gonna need you to cut the bullshit. You saw me as a team-member at fourteen, you have to see me as a team-member now."

Oh. It's then that Tony gets it.

He feels slow compared to Peter, who must have figured out the reason Tony has been particularly careful, even protective of him recently. Reason being Tony doesn't feel about him now the way he felt about him when he was fourteen, and _that's_ what's changed. And of course, Peter is right to feel coddled, even patronized. Tony was being a coddling, patronizing ass, however unconsciously.

"All right. I deserved that call-out, and you're right. I'm sorry." He does have a habit of going overboard on the safeguarding with the people he cares about. “I'll be harder on you next time.”

He hears it a second too late.

Peter’s gaze drifts to his naked chest. “Okay. Good.”

Time to go. Time to stop this. 

“Great. I’ll keep that in mind, then.” The suit fits Peter like a second skin, snug in all the places his muscles outline. Tony tears his own eyes away from places they shouldn't be going. “Was that it? ‘Cause I need to get dressed, and lunch is in fifteen. I think we settled on dumplings; Rhodey was particularly excited about watching the kitchen robots.”

“Right. That was it, yeah.” Peter seems to shake off what came over him and he gets up without protest, nodding. “Sorry.” He looks a little self-conscious, but starts making his way to the door, gleaming blue and red from shoulders to calves.

He’s going to leave. Like Tony hoped he would.

“The suit’s working out okay?” Tony calls after him.

Peter turns. “Y-yeah. All good.” He looks down at his own forearms. “It’s really instinctive sometimes, like it can tell what I’m thinking.”

“There’s a touch of emotional intelligence to the programming. A kind of neural net, though a relatively primitive one.”

“Right.” Peter nods. He makes for the door again, but stops before opening it. He doesn't turn around. “Good thing it’s just a touch or I wouldn’t be able to get out of this room,” he says quietly.

Tony clenches his grip around where he’s holding up the towel.

Peter looks back at him.

There’s a moment where they might still make it out of this—awkwardly laugh it off, maybe, or apologize and move on. Peter’s reason for reciprocation was hardly valid, but it was a reason, and now they don’t have reasons anymore.

Reason is out of the picture.

“When I said I wished you hadn’t told me,” Peter says, and the moment is gone, and Tony is so goddamn gone for him. “I don’t wish that anymore.”

“Okay. Good, I. Didn’t want you to think you were alone in this.”

“I know.”

“I wanted you to know why I did all those fucked up things, even though it was unconscious. I was cruel, and there's no justification, but--”

“You weren’t.” Peter steps towards him.

“I was. I—“ _Fuck_ this part’s hard to say. “I wanted your attention.”

“You always had it. Always.”

“It was wrong of me to like it.” He’s stepping forwards, too. The towel slips half an inch lower when he does. “It was wrong, Peter, I was so fucking selfish—“

“I thought about you when Matt kissed me. When he touched me.”

Jesus Christ. “Peter—“

"I couldn't stand it when you showed up in all those magazines with the others... after you broke up with Pepper, those models, I--I wanted to be one of them so bad. I wanted to be anyone you'd have, even just once."

"I stopped." It only hits him now, as he says it. "A few months ago, a few weeks before you moved into the compound. I didn't even consider doing that again." Fucking hell. "I haven't thought about it since you've been living here."

Peter’s suit starts to melt away, peeling back from his chest and revealing bare skin underneath, his clavicles, his pecs, his abs... he's so close, Tony could just touch him.

“I didn’t sleep with him. I never actually slept with him, Tony—“

Tony drops the towel to grasp at Peter’s arms, his hair, tilting his head back with a thumb to mesh their mouths together, grunting with satisfaction at the feel of it. Peter goes weak in his arms, letting Tony take his weight, letting Tony lead him to the bed.

He gasps when Tony deposits him there and starts running his hands all over his body; he was wearing underwear beneath the armor, but Tony tugs it down, away, and Peter’s flushed cock leaks a drop of pre-come into his own belly.

“T-Tony...” he wheezes, legs fitful against the sheets, back arching. “Please, please, please—“

“What? What’d you want? I’ll give it to you. Whatever you want; I’ll give you anything you—“

“I didn’t let him fuck me,” Peter huffs, making Tony freeze, unknowingly frying his brain with that sentence, with the swear. “He wanted to, but I held out, I—we did stuff, but not that—“

Tony groans and kisses him, falling on top of him, fucking Peter’s soft mouth the way he wishes he was fucking—

He shouldn’t, he _shouldn’t_ , but Peter takes it all in his pliable warmth and keeps asking for more, legs spasming and abs clenching and soon riding the cut of Tony’s abs rhythmically, thighs tensing around Tony’s waist.

Tony grabs his hip and tugs him up, encouraging him, gripping him hard the way he knows Peter won’t hurt. Peter leaks and leaks against his stomach, slicking the way for himself as though he’s about to—definitely about to—

“Oh my God,” Peter mumbles against Tony’s lips, voice high and shot. “Oh my God, Tony, you...”

“I’ve got you,” Tony hisses. “I have you.”

“Yes.” He rakes his fingers up Tony’s back. “Yes, y-yes...”

Tony drops his weight down on him again and Peter’s mouth drops open, and he comes with a wordless cry, lashes wet and fluttering over his cheeks, ankles locking tight against the small of Tony’s back and keeping him in place, hips rocking up in a helpless rhythm, one hand fisted in the bedsheets next to his head.

Tony himself is about to shoot his load just from this, but as soon as Peter gets his breath back he looks up at him and Tony knows what he’s going to say before he says it.

“Will you? Please, just this once... please, will you?”

“Are you sure—“

“Yes." His eyes hold an iron certainty, and a depth of comprehension Tony has seen in them before. "You said... you said anything I wanted.”

“I did.” The one thing he isn’t sure of is whether Peter fully understands the terrifying extent to which he meant that.

“You already know I’ve wanted this for ever.”

 _For ever_. Some part of Tony’s incorrect wiring takes those words and derives a violent sort of pleasure from hearing them.

Something in him snaps. “Yes. Fuck, come on then, yes—“

Peter flips them over like it’s nothing and scoots up the bed to Tony’s nightstand, correctly assuming that he’ll find what he needs in there.

He is back on top of Tony before Tony can even gather his scrambled thoughts, can even blink up at his own ceiling. The way Peter is looking at him is overpowering, makes him hate every molecule between their bodies, makes him regret every second he’s not inside of him.

“Take it easy—“

Peter shakes his head, reaching behind himself with two lube-slick fingers, already hard again, or still. “Don’t wanna take it easy. I’ve been... I’ve fucked myself before, imagining...”

Tony loses time over the next couple of minutes, delirious due to the heat and clean sweat and the feel of the insides of Peter’s thighs spread wide over his hips, softer than satin, hard with muscle, all of Peter hard and soft at the same time, all of Peter for him, Peter’s overwhelmed gaze and his strength and his pink lips. How his skin absorbs the sunlight bathing the bedroom and glows, while Tony lies in partial shadow.

He rolls the condom on without looking down, without being able to look away, and when Peter sinks down on him, jaw unlocking and head lolling back, Tony’s stomach cramps with how much he wants him.

“Peter...”

Peter doesn’t seem to hear him. He rolls his hips and Tony barely refrains from fucking up into the clenching heat of him, letting him set the pace.

But then. “This is yours,” Peter mumbles, embarrassed and flushed and not meeting Tony's eyes. “Wanted this to be yours. Never thought...”

“Well, now you know,” Tony interrupts, not wanting to hear how Peter never thought that he’d be corresponded. Peter is the best thing that’s ever happened to the world, and how can he not know. “Now you know how crazy you... make me...”

Peter rides him without hesitation, faster and faster, already looking like he’s building to his second climax. His body moves like a wave, like a labile sculpture, shuddering and trembling in turns as he processes the sensations, and Tony gets to watch it happen, and knows himself to be the luckiest bastard alive. At one point Peter falls forward and braces himself with a hand on Tony’s chest again, grabbing onto the arc reactor for purchase, fingers tight around it, and without a warning even to himself Tony snaps his hips up and comes, grunting like he’s been hurt, even though pain is the farthest thing from his mind.

Peter comes right with him, and maybe he’d been holding off until he got Tony.

Well. He has him now.

They both lie side by side after, just for a minute, because they'll be late for lunch if they don't rush this.

“Can’t happen again,” Peter pants, drawing his knees together.

“No,” Tony agrees, running a hand through his hair as he tries to catch his breath. “No, definitely not.”

*

During lunch, he hears Vision comment idly on a bruise on Peter’s neck, and Peter says something about the training session, and when he touches it he smiles to himself, just small enough that Vision seems to miss it.

About five minutes later, Rhodey asks Tony if he’s substituted alcohol for pot, because he looks: “...high as a kite, Tony. You with us?”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m serious, man.”

“I’m in a good mood, Rhodey. It happens sometimes.”

Rhodey snorts and punches him in the shoulder, and Tony rolls his eyes and punches him back.

*

“We can drop you off in Queens first. I’ll make my way into the city after.”

Peter tucks his feet under himself in his seat. They are being good, and sitting far apart. They took off five minutes ago according to Tony’s watch which, after running two complete diagnostics tests, is apparently not broken or slow.

“Thanks Mr Stark, but that’s okay. I know your private landing pad is at HQ, and the building is really close to the subway, I’ll just grab the train. May knows I’m getting in a bit later.”

“Peter seriously, it’s no trouble. Let me make life a bit easier for you.”

Peter doesn’t respond for a second.

He has that look in his eye again. A look like he’s thinking he knows something Tony doesn’t; or at the very least speculating, and Tony is proving him right.

Finally, he says: “You didn’t like Matt,” like it’s a certainty, which it is and he's certainly not going to get any pushback from Tony about that statement. “And you also didn’t like that I was with him. Right?”

Tony looks down at his tie and fiddles with it to make it fall straight over his burgundy shirt. “I think that’s been established.”

“Are you still trying to prevent us from being near each other? Even after we broke up?”

Tony stops readjusting his suit.

“Peter, I." But he deserves this call-out, too. "My primary goal was to make your life easier,” he says sincerely. "But yes, I. I'm sorry. I didn't set out to--but it was a bonus. It was definitely on my mind, when I suggested it."

Peter gets up from his seat and Tony’s muscles clench in anticipation, even though they can’t fall into this again, _three is a pattern_ and they already hit that benchmark last time, this would be a fourth incident—

Peter knees onto his lap and leans forward until his lips are hovering a hair’s breadth away from Tony’s, his breath wafting soft and sweet over Tony’s nose and mouth, and Tony suddenly can't remember why he should be stopping this, all he can think of now is why the hell Peter still isn’t kissing him, what he did wrong to deserve this—

Gravity shifts and Tony falls backwards. Peter was using the proximity to reach the controls on the side of the chair and make it whirr and flatten, making Tony lie back under him, turning the structure into a narrow bed and suddenly separating their faces again by the parabola of the ninety-degree angle.

“It’s stuff like that,” Peter tells him, and doesn’t elaborate. He looks helpless; would almost qualify as resigned if he wasn't so obviously turned on as well.

He picks up Tony’s tie and presses his hand against Tony’s chest when Tony tries to lift up, gently pushing him back against the flattened chair.

“FRIDAY?” he says, looking right in Tony’s eyes, wrapping the tie around his wrist. “Can we go via Boston before coming back? No need to land there, I just wanna extend our flight.”

“ _Sure thing, Peter. This will extend travel-time by over two hours, are you sure you wish to proceed?_ ”

“Yeah. And you can delete the last ten minutes of security footage, and stop recording until we land.”

“ _You got it_.”

*

He spent the whole meeting ignoring Matt and he certainly doesn't pass up an opportunity to glare at him, but he keeps his promise to Peter and only exchanges banal small-talk with Pepper, who is in a great mood because the quarterly went very well. He flies back to the compound by himself.

He misses seeing Peter around the compound like a lunatic over the weekend, and even though he doesn’t drink and doesn’t leave the lab for forty-eight hours he almost calls him dozens of times. It’s thanks to his stretch of sleepless toil that him and Bruce make a breakthrough in the design of their shielding tech, however; combining Shuri’s previous advice in a way should theoretically work without using vibranium.

There’s a moment during their long hours of work in companionable silence, when Tony’s at his most sleep-deprived, when he amuses himself with the realization that both him and Bruce are pining over the two arachnids on the team.

"Something funny?" Bruce asks, smiling at him.

"Not really." And then, because he hasn't said this enough to him: "Nice having you back."

Bruce looks pleased.

"And for fuck's sake, just talk to Nat already."

*

When he comes back, Peter looks so good that Tony can’t help it.

He wants to, he tries to, but Peter immediately calls him out for staying in the lab for so long and then tugs him close because they are alone; blissfully alone and blissfully together.

“Just. Just one more,” Peter mumbles, stumbling into him, fresh off his return flight and smelling so good Tony feels dizzy. “Missed you,” he pants. “Missed you, Tony.”

“Fuck.” Tony shoves him up against the lab counter. “Me too, Christ. So much.”

*

“Last time?” Peter gasps, as he breaks into Tony’s shower and slips in with him, giving Tony basically no choice because how, how could a human being deny him.

*

“Seriously, Peter—“ Tony pants, hand sliding into his underwear, making Peter groan into his shoulder; the elevator will re-start in ten minutes. “This has to stop.”

*

“Yes, y-yes—“ Peter sobs, riding Tony on his bed, arching his back and setting a pace that has Tony biting into his own fist so as not to cry out. “Just... this... once...”

*

“...God. So good, Tony.” Peter drops gingerly to the floor, pants still around his ankles because they were both too impatient and it didn’t seem to matter, when Peter’s thighs spread so wide, so smoothly anyway.

“Yeah? You okay?”

“I’m... yeah.” He smiles at Tony and pecks him on the cheek, a small thing that wrenches Tony's chest worse than an hour-long fuck would have. "If I slip up and call you Tony in public are you gonna go all crazy caveman on me, or what?"

Tony snorts, stepping away from him and trying not to think about the truth of the answer to that question. They locked themselves in the weapons storage room and they need to get themselves together before going outside; there's a guard posted at the entrance 24/7. He smoothes out his hair as best as he can by using the reflective metal surface of what looks like a fridge, but is probably home to something alien and classified; if he had to guess he'd bet on more frozen Chitauri organs.

He's already looking forward to the next time, and that's not a good prognostic sign for how this is going to end. _If_ it--but he can't let himself think that. It has to end. Peter deserves someone better. He's not letting him move on by keeping this up; it has to end and he needs to be the one to stop it.

"Hey, so um. Tony?"

Tony braces himself for the promise. It's becoming comical, how they finish these encounters off with a swear, a solemn oath the next light breeze will topple over.

"If I asked you to..."

Tony drops his hand, forgets about his hair. He looks at Peter, who is still catching his breath from what just happened. "Anything."

"Hold on before you say that." Peter takes a resolute breath, then seems to halt in whatever he was going to say. His expression suddenly becomes pensive. "Do you really mean that? You say that to me a lot."

"That I'll give you anything you ask? I do."

Peter keeps looking at him. He's partially lit up by the purple glow of the bomb cores under the plexiglass casings to their right, partially by the military-grade fluorescents above.

"Within reason, though," he tries.

Tony gives him an apologetic shrug. "When you have as much money as I do, that bit doesn't really apply."

"Okay, but I could ask you to commit genocide."

Tony rolls his eyes. "And I'd do it if you asked, but you'd never ask me that. They don't call me a genius for nothing, Peter; I am able to make you that promise because it has the perfect failsafe:  _you_. You'd never ask me something I wouldn't want to give you. Do you understand?" 

Peter gapes at him a moment.

Something important seems to be happening inside that precious brain of his.

"...Peter?"

"Yeah."

"You okay?"

"Y-yeah. I just." He blinks a few times, and a slow smile lights up his face. "I just... realized something."

"If you ask me to give Ned and MJ an airline each I'll do it, but I don't think that would be very character-building."

Peter laughs. "Not quite what I had in mind. I'll see you later?"

"Sure. With the others, you mean."

"Oh, yeah. Definitely." He nods. "This was the last time, for sure." And he sprints away, leaving Tony to explain to a clueless Yolanda that even with all the time they spent in there they couldn't find the Infinity Sword, and it was possible Thor had just been fucking with him about its existence, actually.

*

Dinner with the team is in the kitchen quarters again that night. Bucky has a mild finger injury from training that Steve uses as an excuse to hover worriedly around him and to look like he's moments away from offering to cut his food up for him, much to Sam and Nat's amusement. Bruce and Thor discuss an upcoming visit from Thor's girlfriend, and slip up and mention Loki at one point, prompting a round of shouting that involves everyone but especially Rhodey, who has a lot of opinions, and Thor, who has a lot of brotherly love. Meanwhile, Wanda and Vision make goo-goo eyes at each other and prove Peter's theory about no-one noticing anything between him and Tony completely correct, given who they have around to offset.

When the dishes are put away, Sam hip-checks Tony by the coffee maker (what is it with his friends and cornering him in this particular spot in the kitchen?) and mutters: "Hey. That thing you mentioned about checking in."

Tony sent him a text two days ago, after not being able to sleep once Peter left his bed and he missed the warmth so badly he had to go to the lab to sleep. He didn't feel like drinking, exactly, but he could see himself falling into that want. He hadn't gone into specifics or anything but he had mentioned alcohol in the message, and Sam already knows about the PTSD. He's trained in this stuff. "Yeah?"

"I think it's a great idea. We should talk once in a while, okay?"

"Oh. Okay." It becomes suddenly hard to look Sam in the eye, with how kind Sam's eyes are. He appreciates this more than he'll be able to say. "Thanks, man. Sounds like a plan."

Sam claps him on the back and moves on, nagging Nat for a spoonful of her high-protein ice-cream.

They all saunter off to their own rooms and their own devices after a while, and Tony and Peter sort of wander off independently and just so happen to end up in the gym again, completely coincidentally.

The fact that they never explicitly discussed the time or the location should probably freak Tony out more than it does.

Peter is leaning against one of the columns when Tony enters the large enclosure, and he's resting the back of his head against it in a way that lengthens his neck and has him looking up the concrete column towards the ceiling. He seems to be deep in thought, or as though he's caught in a memory.

"Hey."

"Oh, hey, Tony."

He straightens.

Tony sees him square his shoulders, practically bracing himself; maybe the memory was a source of courage. Either way, something's coming.

"So. Okay." And before Tony can even ask him how his day was, he's off. Tony is barely halfway across the room, and still walking towards him. "I think you're under the impression that I idolize you. And I get why you wouldn't want to try this if you thought that. 'Cause that would mean I don't know you. But I know you, Tony." 

He’s blushing, and there's a chance he's rehearsed this in his head, but he powers through.

Tony is finally coming up to him, and Peter clenches his hands into fists at his sides but keeps going.

“I think you think I think you’re flawless." He pauses, thinking over that sentence. "Okay, that didn't make any sense, but you know what I mean. When I said... when I asked you not to be so perfect, that time I was high and I was all--complaining about your existence, I didn’t mean you didn’t have flaws. I just don't care. Or, I do, I just love them, too.”

Tony stops right in front of him.

“I’ve known you for years. I want you anyway. I.” He takes another deep breath, looking up into Tony's eyes. "I love you anyway."

“Peter.” A clench of fierce joy tightened in his gut at Peter's words, but his selfishness only goes so far. He's terrified of how much he hasn't earned those incredible words. “You deserve—“

"How about I deserve what I _want_?” Peter interrupts, eyes beseeching. “How about that?”

He slaps his palm over the arc reactor, fingers digging into Tony's chest. 

“Listen to me, okay? I’m asking you for this,” he says fiercely. “I want it. I’m asking for it.”

Tony stares at him for a long time, the hits coming in waves.

He’s so fucking smart, this kid. He knows—Christ, he’s so smart and Tony is so helpless. He does know Tony. It's the only way Peter could have presented his argument, the only way to make Tony's warped conscience accept, and agree. Not only that, but even as Tony begins to understand the consequences of Peter's ask rationally, he feels a calm steal over him, a clarity, almost a lifeline to sanity that lets him frame how this will work in the long term. Because if he thinks of it like that, then he might just be able to live with himself, and make them both happy.

Because if there's one thing he's sure of, it's that he's around for as long as Peter wants him.

He manages a half-hearted last-ditch attempt at saying his piece. "You do deserve better, for the record."

"I deserve better than a world-saving genius billionaire with a heart of gold?" Peter scoffs softly, incredulous.

"Yes," Tony replies, with embarrassing sincerity. "Even one that--" He clears his throat. "One that loves you as much as this one does."

Peter flushes, expression temporarily pained as Tony's confession sinks in. He recovers, though, that stubborn streak winning out despite the corners of his mouth twitching upwards in giddy sentiment. "Well then I don't care. I want the one I have."

Tony smirks. "That you do." He feels his expression soften, as the realities of feasibility start to creep in. “We’re going to have to lie to a lot of people for a while. Legal doesn't mean... appropriate.”

That doesn't faze Peter, who is on a roll. “I’ve lied before.”

“Didn’t you get caught a bunch of times?” Tony says, raising an eyebrow.

“Twice!” he complains, hitting Tony in the arm, and he's grinning. “I got caught twice, and that was just ‘cause Ned and May kept coming into my bedroom without my knowing.”

“Okay, okay, I suppose Vision-repellent walls are going to be my next lab project."

"Or we could just hang out in your room."

Tony smiles. “Suppose we could do that."

He presses Peter up against the concrete column for a few minutes, kissing him with growing surety.

*

“Thanks for your help, Steve! See you later, Sam! Bye, Mr Stark!”

Peter throws the goodbyes over his shoulder as he hops away to the gym showers, his grey sweatshirt darkened in an inverted ‘T’ of perspiration, his shorts flapping. Tony watches him go for a split-second and turns away, back to his workout. He smiles down at the machine, tugging the cord with renewed vigor.

“Hey, Tony.”

He looks up and stops rowing.

“What’s up, Cap?”

Steve stands next to him, breath slightly quickened by his own sparring session with Peter, who actually seems like he tired him out.

“I just.” Steve huffs out a small smile. “This is the last time I’ll bring this up, I swear, but I just wanted to say it’s really great, how things are with you and Peter these days.”

Tony leans back a little in his seat, quirking an eyebrow. “Which is how?” he prompts.

Steve points a thumb behind his back in the direction Peter left. “I mean, you saw that. A few months ago he would have been staring at you the whole session. And don’t think I haven’t noticed that you really toned down your interactions with him, even though I was wrong to ask you to. But I’ve noticed, and so has Bucky. Especially since Peter broke up with that guy he was seeing. It’s clearly helped a bunch.”

Tony nods thoughtfully, and feels a rueful sort of sympathy for the Steve a few years in the future, when Tony intends to have a very specific conversation with him. Still, the Steve of right now means well, and is protective of Peter, and Tony can’t fault him for any of it.

“I appreciate that, Rogers.”

“Just wanted to mention it.”

Steve walks back to Sam, and laughs out loud at whatever Sam says to him that Tony’s ears don’t pick up. Knowing Sam, it was probably a compliment of Steve's form couched as a dig.

Tony resumes his work on the rowing machine again, and attempts to directly examine his guilt as he does so, shoulders and biceps straining. He keeps being distracted by thoughts of Peter’s grin this morning when he woke up to the carefully put-together breakfast tray Tony had claimed was for himself and then brought up to him in his room.

He has plans for them, and distant, grand ideas for ways of showering Peter with gifts and attention that will fly under the radar at first, and with so much to think about he hasn't really had time to think about drinking, or about wallowing around self-deprecating. Peter knows him. They are going to meet up later today to know each other some more, in fact. So far, things are good. Bruce and Natasha are the new thing in the group, and Thor finally brought his girlfriend into the fold and she instantly won the whole team's undying loyalty by saving Bucky's life on a mission.

There have been a few missions since things with Peter started: two where Tony was in the roster and Peter wasn't, two where they were both called in, and one where Peter went and Tony didn't, and despite a couple of near misses, even that's been working out better than Tony could have hoped.

"So," he'd said to Peter about a week ago, flying them back from a weekend in New York (one where Peter had only seen his Aunt for a few hours and Tony hadn't even set foot in Stark Industries HQ). "Turns out I'm a lot less nice than you thought, hm?"

Peter had leaned up on his elbow and rested his head up on his hand so he could look down at Tony's face.

"No, Tony." He had lightly kicked Tony in the shin; both of them lying on the single chair, hurtling through the dark night, cocooned in their soft light. "You're just as nice as I knew you would be."

"...You're a very wise young man."

"That's why I picked a very stupid old one who gives me anything I want." He'd grinned. "So give me a bank."

"Done."

"An airline each for Ned and MJ."

"Done and done."

Peter had nudged him with his foot again. "All right, give me Australia."

"Give me a couple of months and you got it."

Peter had laughed, and by that point Tony had been smirking, too. “Give me your company?” He’d murmured.

He had given Peter a kiss instead.

 

The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you SO much for reading along, and I really hope you liked this story! Every single comment was re-read upwards of 10 times by a grateful, gleeful, inspired author. I love you guys and deeply appreciate the time taken to share your thoughts with me, it made my day every. single. time <3
> 
> And finally, since some of you have asked: the chapter titles (sea, mint, jade, lime and spring) are shades of green! I must admit I had a lot of fun picking which ones I wanted to use to thematically associate with what was going on in the story at a particular time :)
> 
> Once again, my tag is "author has already arranged a ride to church trust me" and I have two more fics in the works that I will start posting once I've had a chance to work on them more. One of them is pure filth, and the other is the 100K slowest burn I've attempted yet... I'm really excited!

**Author's Note:**

> I so, so hope you enjoyed this part! This went longer than my expected 25K because of course it did, but is still a shorter (though hopefully no less sweeter) work than my other Starker fic [Stipulations](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14771135?view_full_work=true) :)
> 
> If you feel like leaving a comment please know it will be CHERISHED, as any form of feedback is! Thank you so much for reading!!


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